As inspiration for this spring’s rock ’n’ roll Amazon streaming series Daisy Jones & the Six, as well as the 2019 Taylor Jenkins Reid bestseller it’s based on, people automatically talk about Rumours-era Fleetwood Mac. But while Daisy Jones shares the 1970s Los Angeles setting, as well as some obvious musical and fashion nods, the details of the internal romantic and artistic battles in the fictional Six band don’t map very precisely to the complicated cocaine-coated partner-switching of the Fleetwood Mac story.
In fact, the basic tale could be drawn from any number of music scenes past or present. As the Six’s lead-singer dude Billy (Sam Claflin) drawls at one point, “When you’re making an album, it’s an intimate thing. It has to be.” But some are more intimate than others, and how can a streaming musical soap opera hope to get the details of that experience remotely right?
For the answer, you have to hang in deep into the episode credits and notice some names billed vaguely as “consultants.” One is Kim Gordon, formerly of the titanic indie-rock band Sonic Youth, whose 30-year run came to a crashing end in 2011 when bassist and vocalist Gordon discovered that her bandmate and husband, guitarist Thurston Moore, was having an affair. The couple and the band both dissolved, leaving a generation of indie fans feeling orphaned.
Later in the credits, in smaller print, come four names from that generation, specifically from the web of artists connected with Canada’s 2000s indie collective Broken Social Scene—Stars, Metric, Feist, Do Make Say Think, and many others—which share between them a lower-profile interpersonal history that’s equally rich and “sordid,” as BSS and Stars singer Amy Millan joked to me. For Daisy Jones to get the benefit of their accumulated wisdom, Millan, Brendan Canning, Andrew Whiteman, and Ariel Engle were invited to spend a day in L.A. and on a follow-up Zoom session, in a tea-spilling party with the whole writers room. “And they paid us,” Millan added, “which seems easier to get done in TV than in music these days.”
The series’ roster of consultants also includes 1970s soul and R&B singers Claudia Lennear and Linda Clifford, whose expertise contributed to the series’ expanded story for the Donna Summer–esque Simone (Nabiyah Be), a friend and mentor to Daisy (Riley Keough).
It’s been widely noted that one of the wisest moves made by Daisy Jones producers was to toss out Jenkins Reid’s lyric sketches from the book and recruit well-connected Los Angeles producer and session musician Blake Mills to collaborate with real-world accomplished songwriters—including Phoebe Bridgers, Jackson Browne, Marcus Mumford, and others—to compose songs for the on-screen Six. As a result, unusually for a fictional band, the Six’s hits credibly sound as if they could have been genuine successes. Likewise, the series took advantage of its protracted pandemic production schedule to send cast members on music lessons and a group “band camp.”
But with the working-musician consultants, the production had one more crucial, but less mentioned, grounding component—its band-drama coaches.
“We were interested in getting details of what the day-to-day life of being on the road is,” said Jihan Crowther, who was a writer and executive story editor on Daisy Jones and had the idea of bringing the BSS members on board. “How are people living together, working together? … And [given Daisy Jones’ romance-tangled storyline], it was helpful to have bands where there were men and women in the band together.”
Or, as Millan more colorfully phrases it, “Breakups, make-outs, onstage fighting, offstage forgiveness. That kind of thing.”
Some of those tales were already public knowledge. The core of sometime BSS singer Emily Haines’ main band Metric, for instance, was with her then-partner James Shaw—but now they have carried on many years past their romantic split. When BSS began, Leslie Feist and Canning were exes, and she was dating Whiteman. After they broke up, she and BSS chief convener Kevin Drew were briefly an item, all of them contending with those raw emotions while performing and touring together. Today, Whiteman is married to Engle, another, later-arrived BSS member. The two worked as a duo for a time as AroarA, but now she performs and records solo as La Force, while he is pursuing a doctorate in poetry studies at Concordia University in Montreal.
And notoriously, in Stars’ case, Millan early on “was engaged to the keyboard player, but I ended up marrying the bass player.” How those dynamics almost tore the band apart, and how the band improbably survived and grew closer instead, was part of the subject matter when Stars dramatized its own backstory in a hybrid 2020 stage-play/concert called Stars: Together at Crow’s Theatre in Toronto. (Unfortunately, the pandemic put the kibosh on plans to tour the lively and endearingly awkward “meta” production to other cities, at least for the time being.)
Other anecdotes are kept more discreet. “[Your] story is never just your own,” Millan said. “It always also belongs to the other people in the story. Which made the anonymity of telling our tumultuous histories in the writers room much simpler—if they used anything, it would then unfold as other characters.”
“Neither Brendan [Canning] nor I were that comfortable spilling secrets,” Andrew Whiteman told me. “I think what we really tried was to give them a portrait of the psyche of a touring musician—and how, slowly, the more time you spend on the road, how that can get really fucked up. … You really are in a submarine. You are looking out those little windows, bonding with the people you’re with in intense and unusual ways, in the otherness of that life.”
“I think it’s impossible to get a collective of people and not have conflict,” said Millan. “And generally how we tried to channel the conflict was into a better show or a more charged take in the studio. All those things may seem glorified, but they’re very honestly what happens when you get a group of 12 women and men and throw them on a tour bus, when they’re in their 20s and they get paid in alcohol.”
In the Daisy Jones series, those tensions are the draw for viewers, but they’re also presented as ultimately destructive: They (spoiler alert) break up the band after only their first album, albeit an absurdly successful one. Groups like BSS and Stars, by contrast, have survived for decades now, in ever-evolving forms. “For many of us who lacked adequate familial connections, family is instantly what it becomes,” Whiteman said. “And for Broken, it remains that way today. Like, it’s a big-ass, functional/dysfunctional family, but family in very real terms.”
“The only thing we have is forgiveness,” said Millan. “Here we still are. And that is because of the continued ongoing forgiveness that gets replayed still to this day, with different dramas. It might not be ones in the bedroom, but [it still] takes effort and compromise, maintained through these days of being in a band for 23 years, that we continued the ethos of forgiveness, and giving the benefit of the doubt that the person isn’t out to try to hurt you.”
The chapter about this cluster of artists in Michael Barclay’s recent book Hearts on Fire, about the explosion of Canadian indie music in the early to mid-2000s, is cheekily titled “Your Ex-Lover Is in the Band” (a play on the Stars fan favorite “Your Ex-Lover is Dead”). He pointed out to me that such incestuous involvements among a gang of people who in many cases have been friends since their teens is not so unusual for any vaguely bohemian youth scene. It’s partly voyeuristic fascination from fans living more conventional lives that makes “behind the music” dramas like Daisy Jones popular, and deepens listeners’ attachments to the real-life bands as well.
That there are so many overlapping BSS-connected bands also makes it all seem more grand-scale and dramatic. “I don’t get too theoretical about it, but it seems like an unusually Canadian thing,” Barclay told me. “I’m not just talking about Broken Social Scene in Toronto. I’m talking about New Pornographers in Vancouver. I’m talking about Godspeed! You Black Emperor and the Constellation Records scene in Montreal. I can’t think of a lot of other cities that birth one big band that has all these other bands embedded inside it.”
The Broken Social Scene crowd’s aesthetic perhaps includes an added attraction to extravagant emotional gestures, whether in the everyone’s-invited massive musical ensembles that characterize BSS albums and shows or in the romantic melodrama of Stars’ standout duets between Millan and co-frontperson Torquil Campbell. There’s a robustness in that, as well as in the one-for-all community spirit that Kevin Drew in particular promotes with boundless enthusiasm.
They’ve also often been able to make imaginative use of their internal tensions, much the way that Daisy Jones, at some of its peak moments, depicts the band’s co–lead singers, intensely emotionally involved but never actually a couple, communicating through songwriting or performance the things they aren’t saying aloud.
“There’s levels on which you want the organization to be smooth,” said Whiteman, “but then whether you want it or not, there are absolutely creative tensions. You’re writing about love or you’re writing about politics or metaphysics. That’s about all I’ve got. You write about those things you’re [going through].”
Performing songs alongside the people they’re about, night after night on tour, can enhance their potency or it can feel like poison, as seen in Daisy Jones. How do artists turn it to their advantage?
“I think there’s a catharsis … in being able to tell the story of friendship and betrayal and romance through songs,” said Millan. “I have a song called ‘Skinny Boy’ on my first album, which I wrote about Kevin Drew in 1998, right? And he played drums on it, on the track. We’ve played it live with Social Scene a few times. And there’s so much of this lore, throughout the community of musicians in Canada, about songs that have been written about people. But I feel like it’s just such good luck. Most people have their heart broken and it just has to stay inside, but we use our heartbreak to be able to be the loudspeaker [for someone else’s] heart that’s been broken. But I’ve got to be able to articulate it in a way that it gets off my chest.”
Romance or no romance, mixed-gender bands have to cope with larger social dynamics too. BSS started off as more of a boys’ club, and had to learn to treat the female artists who joined them as more than merely “girl singers.” Whiteman remembered an early incident that’s gone down in BSS infamy. “When I was with Leslie [Feist] in the beginning, I remember her saying, ‘I’m going over to this guy Kevin’s house to play.’ … So she brought her guitar over, and she’s gonna play on this record of her ex-boyfriend Brendan, and this guy Kevin. That was before I had met Kevin. … But when she came home, she was fucking pissed because she wanted to play guitar, and Kevin was like, ‘No, you just sing.’ And it was very uncool.” It became something Feist would tease Drew about later.
Such stories bring to mind a secondary plotline in Daisy Jones, in which the keyboardist Karen (Suki Waterhouse) insists on keeping her relationship with another band member secret, because she knows it will interfere with how she’s perceived as a musician in her own right.
Later, when Whiteman and Engle started working as a duo in AroarA, they would fight because he was in the habit of making music almost exclusively by jamming with other guys, while she wanted to talk out ideas. “It’s a gender stereotype, maybe, but dudes pick up instruments and start jamming and they don’t talk to each other. They don’t even really look at each other,” said Whiteman. Similarly, in Daisy Jones, the title character confounds Billy when they first meet by asking probing questions about the subtexts of his songs.
“I think it’s no accident,” said Engle, “that [when I went solo] I named myself something grandiose and feminist—an aspirational goal, to be ‘La Force.’ Throughout my life working as a musician, it’s been predominantly with men, because it’s predominantly a male industry. And yeah, I’ve stifled opinions. I’ve been through a lot of it, and these are not even particularly toxic environments.”
“Then we get older and the conflict changes,” said Millan. “Like, for me, being pregnant twice, traveling pregnant, having two children, being able to negotiate when to travel with a brand-new baby: All of that still has to be negotiated. You have five people dependent on you in order to make a living. We don’t have the kind of security for one person to go and take maternity leave for a year.
“And now,” she added, “because we’re entering into this new middle age, it’s shifted—shifted into this feeling of ultimate gratitude to be able to do what we do and have, touch wood, our friends still around to do it. You look at the legendary band Tragically Hip, a band we grew up with, and they lost their leader to cancer. So we’ve shifted our idea that it’s gonna last forever. We know that it won’t.” You can hear the emotional impact of those developments on Stars’ latest album, From Capelton Hill, which stands beside their strongest work.
Meanwhile, none of the Canadian band consultants know how their input affected Daisy Jones in the end. None of them have watched it yet. Nor do they sound likely to.
“There’s a little bit of a redundancy,” said Millan, “to go into rehearsal and play a bunch of music with a group of people you’ve been involved with for so many years, and then come home and flip on the TV to watch a mirror image, but with their skinnier and more expensive Los Angeles clothing. So I haven’t really dived in there. I’m just still working on Ted Lasso. I was never on a soccer team.”
