BILLY: I knew I wasn’t going to fall asleep that night. So I got up out of bed and I wrote a song.

ROD: Billy comes into the studio the next day. Everybody else is there, ready to get to recording. I’ve even got Daisy there, relatively sober, drinking a coffee.

DAISY: I felt bad. I did not mean to blow off the recording session, obviously.

Why did I hurt myself like that? I can’t explain it. I wish I could. I hated it about myself. I hated it about myself and I kept doing it and then I hated myself more. There are no good answers about this.

ROD: Billy comes in and he shows us all a song he wrote. “Impossible Woman.”

I said, “You wrote this last night?”

He said, “Yeah.”

BILLY: Daisy reads it and goes, “Cool.”

GRAHAM: It was clear, from the feeling in the room, that none of us, not even Daisy and Billy, were going to acknowledge it was about Daisy.

BILLY: It’s not about Daisy. It’s about when you’re sober, there are things you can’t touch, things you can’t have.

KAREN: After Graham and I heard Billy play it for the first time, I said to Graham, “That song is…”

And Graham just goes, “Yup.”

DAISY: It was a great damn song.

WARREN: Didn’t care then, barely care now.

KAREN: “Dancing barefoot in the snow/cold can’t touch her, high or low.” That’s Daisy Jones.

BILLY: I decided to write a song about a woman that felt like sand through your fingers, like you could never really catch her. As an allegory for the things I couldn’t have, couldn’t do.

DAISY: I said, “This song is for us to sing?”

Billy said, “No, I think you should give it a shot on your own. I wrote it for your register.”

I said, “It seems more obvious that a man would be singing this about a woman.”

Billy said, “It’s more interesting if a woman is singing it. It gives it a haunting kind of quality.”

I said, “All right, I’ll take a stab at it.”

I took some time with it while everybody was lining out their parts. A few days later, I went in. I listened as everybody laid their tracks down. Just trying to find a way into it.

When it was my turn to get in there, I gave it my best. I tried to make it feel a little sad, maybe. Like I missed this woman. I was thinking, Maybe this woman is my mother, maybe this woman is my lost sister, maybe there is something I need from this woman. You know?

I thought, It’s wistful, it’s ethereal. That kind of a thing. But I was doing take after take and I could tell it wasn’t working.

And I kept looking to everybody, thinking, Somebody get me out of this mess. I’m flailing over here. And I didn’t know what to do. And I started getting angry.

KAREN: Daisy has absolutely no formal training. She does not know the names of chords, she does not know various vocal techniques. If what Daisy does naturally doesn’t work, then you have to take Daisy off the song.

DAISY: I’m just hoping somebody saves me from myself. I say I want to take five. Teddy suggests I go for a walk, clear my head. I walk around the block. But I’m only making it worse because I just keep thinking I can’t do it and Of course I can’t do it and all that. And I finally just give up. I get in my car and I drive away. I couldn’t deal with it, so I left.

BILLY: I wrote the song for her. I mean I wrote it for her to sing. So that made me mad. Her giving up like that.

Obviously, I understood why she was frustrated. I mean, Daisy is shockingly talented. Like it will shock you, to be near it. Her talent. But she didn’t know how to control it. She couldn’t call on it, you know? She just had to hope it would be there.

But giving up wasn’t cool. Especially not after trying for, you know, a couple of hours, tops. That’s the problem with people who don’t have to work for things. They don’t know how to work for things.

DAISY: That night, somebody knocks on my door. I was with Simone making dinner. I open the door and there’s Billy Dunne.

BILLY: I went there with the express purpose of getting her to sing the damn song. Did I want to go back to the Chateau Marmont? No, I did not. But that’s what I had to do, so I did it.

DAISY: He sits me down and Simone is in the kitchen making Harvey Wallbangers and she offers Billy one.

BILLY: And immediately Daisy blocks me and says, “No!” As if I was going to take the drink from Simone’s hand.

DAISY: I was embarrassed that Simone had offered it to him because I knew he already felt like I was a scummy boozehound drug addict. And if Billy thought I was going to knock him off the wagon, I was going to do everything in my power to make sure that wasn’t true.

BILLY: It…surprised me. She had actually been listening to me.

DAISY: Billy said to me, “You have to sing this song.” I told him that I just didn’t have the right voice for it. We talked back and forth for a while, about what the song meant and whether there was a way into it for me and finally Billy just said that it was about me. That he had written it about me. That I’m the impossible woman. “She’s blues dressed up like rock ’n’ roll/untouchable, she’ll never fold.” That was me. And something kind of clicked in my head.

BILLY: I absolutely never told Daisy the song was about her. I wouldn’t have done that because the song wasn’t about her.

DAISY: That felt like a breaking point into it. But I still said to him that I wasn’t sure I was the right sound.

BILLY: I told her that the song needed a raw energy. It needed to feel like it crackled under the needle. It needed to feel electric. Like she was singing to save her life.

DAISY: That’s not my voice.

BILLY: I said, “You need to go into the studio tomorrow and try again. Promise me that you will try again.” And she agreed.

DAISY: So I go in there the next morning and they had cleared out the place. The rest of the band wasn’t there. It was just Billy, Teddy, Rod, and Artie at the board. I walked in and I just…I knew this was going to be different.

ROD: I went out to smoke a cigarette as Billy pulled Daisy into the booth and started giving her a pep talk.

BILLY: I knew how the song was supposed to sound and I just kept trying to think of how to explain it to her. What I realized, eventually, was that Daisy’s all about effortlessness. And this had to be a song that sounded like it hurt to sing, like it was taking all the effort in her body. I wanted Daisy to feel, after she was done singing it, that she had run a marathon.

DAISY: There is a grit to my voice but it’s not a deep-in-your-gut kind of grit. And that’s what Billy wanted.

BILLY: I said something like “Sing it so hard, so loud, that you can’t control where your voice goes. Let your voice crack. Lose control of it.”

I gave her permission to sound bad. Think of how you sing when you’re singing to the radio at full volume. When you can’t hear yourself, you’re not afraid to really belt it out because you won’t have to cringe when your voice breaks or you veer off-key. Daisy needed that kind of freedom. That takes a crapload of confidence. And Daisy didn’t actually have confidence. She was always good. Confidence is being okay being bad, not being okay being good.

I said, “If you sing this song in a way where you sound good the entire time, you’ve lost.”

DAISY: He said, “This song isn’t meant to be pretty. Don’t sing it like it is.”

ROD: I came back in and Billy’s got Daisy in the booth with the lights dimmed, a Vicks inhaler, a steaming mug of tea next to her, a pile of lozenges and some tissues, a huge pitcher of water, I don’t know, you name it, it was in there with her.

And then Daisy sat down in a chair and Billy got right back up, jumped out of the control room, went into the booth with her again. He took the chair away, raised the mike. He said, “You need to stand up and sing so hard your knees buckle.”

Daisy looked terrified.

DAISY: He wanted me to shed every inhibition I had. Billy was saying that he wanted me to be willing to fail spectacularly in front of him—and Teddy and Artie. But I knew there was no moving past my own ego stone sober.

I said, “Can we get some wine in here?”

Billy said, “You don’t need it.”

I said, “No, you don’t need it.”

BILLY: Rod goes right in there with a bottle of brandy.

ROD: I’m not about to take away the easy stuff and have her running that much faster for the hard stuff.

DAISY: I took a few swigs and I looked at Billy through the window and I said, into the mike, “All right, you want it to sound a little ugly, right?” He nodded. And I said, “And no one’s gonna judge me if I end up sounding like a screeching cat?”

And I’ll never forget, Billy leaned onto the button, and said, “If you were a cat, your screech would bring every cat running to you.” And I liked that. The idea that just by being me, I was doing all right.

So I opened up my mouth and I breathed in deep and then I went for it.

BILLY: None of us told Daisy this and I…I hesitate in even saying it now but…her first two takes were god-awful. I mean, wow. I was starting to regret what I’d told her. But we just kept encouraging her.

When someone is out on a ledge like that, especially when you’re the one that coaxed them out there in the first place, you don’t dare do anything to unbalance them.