Daisy Jones & The Six

Genre: Contemporary / Historical / Romance

Book Type: Audio

Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid

Narrator: Jennifer Beals, Benjamin Bratt, Judy Greer and Pablo Schreiber

Pages / Length: 368 pages / 9 hours and 3 minutes

Publisher: Ballantine Books (March 5, 2019) / Random House Audio

Book Description:

Everyone knows DAISY JONES & THE SIX, but nobody knows the reason behind their split at the absolute height of their popularity . . . until now.

Daisy is a girl coming of age in L.A. in the late sixties, sneaking into clubs on the Sunset Strip, sleeping with rock stars, and dreaming of singing at the Whisky a Go Go. The sex and drugs are thrilling, but it’s the rock ’n’ roll she loves most. By the time she’s twenty, her voice is getting noticed, and she has the kind of heedless beauty that makes people do crazy things.

Also getting noticed is The Six, a band led by the brooding Billy Dunne. On the eve of their first tour, his girlfriend Camila finds out she’s pregnant, and with the pressure of impending fatherhood and fame, Billy goes a little wild on the road.

Daisy and Billy cross paths when a producer realizes that the key to supercharged success is to put the two together. What happens next will become the stuff of legend.

The making of that legend is chronicled in this riveting and unforgettable novel, written as an oral history of one of the biggest bands of the seventies. Taylor Jenkins Reid is a talented writer who takes her work to a new level with Daisy Jones & The Six, brilliantly capturing a place and time in an utterly distinctive voice.

Thoughts:

TJR always has some twist you didn’t even know was going to happen and then has you completely surprised! This is another one that doesn’t disappoint.

Told in an interview style (which was incredible on audio), you think this is the story about a band, but it is about so much more. It’s about love, friendship, despair, heartache, drugs, rock-n-roll, family, dreams, and success. I loved the story and was surprised by the twist in the end.

I did the audio of this and it was fantastic - however - I also have the book and love the way it is laid out. No matter the reading experience for this one, I highly recommend it!

🎤I found this quote to be a great insight to the book:

BILLY: […] And then, you know what I realized? It wasn't very important. How I felt about Daisy. History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing. And I was proud of what I did.

DAISY: Did Billy's actions really warrant the song? Probably not. I mean, no. They didn't. But that's the thing. Art doesn't owe anything to anyone.

Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, not whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about. (Page 213)

Favorite Quotes:

🎤 So this is a girl that desperately wants to connect. But there's no one in her life who is truly interested in who she is, especially not her parents. And it really breaks her. But it is also how she grows up to become an icon.

We love broken, beautiful people. And it doesn't get much more obviously broken and more classically beautiful than Daisy Jones (page 8).

🎤 BILLY: I'd been infatuated before, called it love. But when I met [Camila], it was something different altogether. She just ... made the world make sense to me. She even made me like myself more.

She'd come watch us practice and listen to my new stuff and give me really good notes on all. And there was a calmness to her that ... nobody else had. It felt like when I was with her, I knew everything would be fine. It was like I was following the North Star.

You know, Camila was born content, I think. She wasn't born with whatever chip on her shoulder some of us are born with. I used to say I was born broken. She was born whole. (Page 25)

🎤 DAISY: […] Hank wanted me to sing the song really sweet and I wasn't feeling it. I sang it the way I wanted to. A little bit rough, a little bit breathy. Hank said, "Can we please just do one take where you sing it smooth, maybe a key higher?"

I grabbed my purse and said, "Nope." And I left.

SIMONE: She got signed to Runner Records right after that.

DAISY: I didn't care about anything but songwriting. The singing was okay but I didn't want to be some puppet up there, singing other people's words. I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted to sing my own stuff.

SIMONE: Daisy doesn't value anything that comes easy to her. Money, looks, even her voice. She wanted people to listen to her. (Page 45-46)

🎤 DAISY: I said, "It's like some of us are chasing after our nightmares the way other people chase dreams."

He said, "That's a song, right there." (Page 164)

🎤 KAREN: I think people that are too similar... they don't mix well. I used to think soul mates were two of the same. I used to think I was supposed to look for somebody that was just like me.

I don't believe in soul mates anymore and I'm not looking for anything. But if I did believe in them, I'd believe your soul mate was somebody who had all the things you didn't, that needed all the things you had. Not somebody who's suffering from the same stuff you are. (Page 177)

🎤 DAISY: The harder I worked as a songwriter, the longer I worked at it, the better I got. Not in any linear way, really. More like zigzags. But I was getting better, getting really good. And I knew that. I knew that when I showed the song to him. But knowing you're good can only take you so far. At some point, you need someone else to see it, too. Appreciation from people you admire changes how you see yourself. And Billy saw me the way I wanted to be seen. There is nothing more powerful than that. I really believe that.

Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror. (Page 201)

🎤 BILLY: […] And then, you know what I realized? It wasn't very important. How I felt about Daisy. History is what you did, not what you almost did, not what you thought about doing. And I was proud of what I did.

DAISY: Did Billy's actions really warrant the song? Probably not. I mean, no. They didn't. But that's the thing. Art doesn't owe anything to anyone.

Songs are about how it felt, not the facts. Self-expression is about what it feels to live, not whether you had the right to claim any emotion at any time. Did I have a right to be mad at him? Did he do anything wrong? Who cares! Who cares? I hurt. So I wrote about. (Page 213)

🎤 Camila looked at me for a moment and then she said something that changed my life. She said, "Don't count yourself out this early, Daisy. You're all sorts of things you don't even know yet." That really stuck with me. That who I was wasn't entirely already determined. That there was still hope for me. That a woman like Camila Dunne thought I was...

Camila Dunne thought I was worth saving. (Page 320)

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️