Daisy Jones & The Six Makes The Best Album There Never Was…

If not the best drama

This next one is called “For The Love of God, Brush Your Teeth.” (Amazon Prime)

Daisy Jones & The Six sets quite a task. A fictionalization of behind-the-scenes drama, much like what inspired Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, it requires a collection of songs that get within swinging distance of the classics.

Not an easy task.

But they did it.

Mock me if you will. Aurora, the album accompanying the miniseries, is indeed in the same league as Rumours.

I’ve done it! My creation lives! Behold: good-looking musicians! (Amazon Prime)

The show’s story? Not so much.

Get Mac To Where You Once Fleetlonged

Opener “Aurora” lays percussive guitar riffs and organ swells over a stomping guitar beat. “Let Me Down Easy” and “Kill You To Try” weave rock breakdowns with pop choruses that drop to minor or soar in major at exactly the right time. “Two Against Three” is a soft organ and acoustic guitar ballad delivered in Riley Keough’s haunting upper register. The fake #1 hit “Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)” earworms hard with all the trappings of a 70s hit. It starts quiet, a soulful folk song, before a rocking bridge kicks in and brings the final chorus to epic proportions.

Side 2 of the album offers a few diversions — the straight blues rock of “More Fun To Miss (Than To Be With)” and the Abbey Road-esque swells of “Please.” But “Regret Me” and “The River” are Fleetwood Crack, impossible to stop humming, throaty blues in the verses and wistful folk in the choruses.

Riley Keough’s voice is delicate in places and throaty in others, Ann Wilson as well as Stevie Nicks. Sam Claflin’s voice is more Elton John than Lindsay Buckingham, but when he needs to belt, the man delivers.

The music nods to its inspiration — “Look At Us Now” has the same arrangement and nearly the same bridge riff as “The Chain.” Both “Let Me Down Easy” and “The River” take a cue from “Go Your Own Way” — lively rock duets that could easily be rendered on acoustic guitar. But these are the only really obvious bits.

Overall, it’s not winking at Rumours as much as you’d expect.

Exactly five seconds before the guy screaming “Free Bird!” took a drum stick in the eye. (Amazon Prime)

I’m A Little Bit Country (& I’m A Little Bit Schlock)

It’s not as impossible as it seems to write something like Rumours now. The same way no one believes writers when we say good ideas come cheap, no one believes musicians when we say great songs are a dime a dozen. I can play and sing you multiple earworms that never made it past local punk bands in the 90s, and they’ll be as catchy as any of the era’s radio hits.

Still I can’t help but be blown away by what Blake Mills, Phoebe Bridgers and the other songwriters involved did. Aurora really feels like it was thrown together in a frenzy of coke-fueled creativity, before AIDS, Reagan, streaming and the other four plagues. No words, just chef’s kiss.

But Wait! There’s A Story Too…

The making of Rumours was a famous mess. Lindsay Buckingham and Stevie Nicks broke up while writing the emotionally charged songs, and at the same time Nicks had an affair with married drummer Mick Fleetwood. The more you dig, the more tawdry it gets. It’s tawdries all the way down.

Daisy Jones aims to strip away scandal and look at the personal cost of art. Billy Dunne, lead singer of The Six, is so loaded from coke, alcohol, and groupie sex that he misses his own daughter’s birth. After an intervention, a penitent, sober Dunne swears never to let his family down again.

In the book, the Six gradually grow stagnant creatively, until their producer pushes them together with rising star Daisy Jones. The show is more urgent — Billy’s stint in rehab not only broke his goodwill with his family but also the record label. To give the band a makeover, their haggard producer adds Daisy.

But Daisy is as much of a mess as Billy used to be. A product of childhood neglect, she tries to find herself in songwriting at the same time she tries to lose herself in drugs and alcohol. She comes in late, blitzed, sometimes not at all, but when she’s on, she’s a force of nature.

Everyone, make the face your dad made when he first heard K-Pop. (Amazon Prime)

‘The Rain And Your Wife’

Billy’s songs are regretful and apologetic. Daisy isn’t going to ‘sing an entire album about the rain and your wife.’ (This is one of the great cinematic lines of 2023.) Billy is a classic control freak. Daisy changes his lyrics, bluntly criticizing his arrangements. Angry, Billy forces a vote — and the band and producer agree with Daisy’s changes.

Billy’s afraid of his dark place, of the person who cheated on his wife, stayed stoned for months and missed the birth of his daughter. Writing songs with Daisy, Billy is forced to face the part of himself he hates — and he comes to understand and accept that part.

Daisy finds, in Billy, the first person who really values her real self, not just her body, her parties or her voice. Their relationship becomes an emotional affair. The framing device — interviews with members of the band, thirty years on — hints that the affair might have been more than emotional.

The story is aching and powerful, continually asking where the line is between art and the person who made it.

The cheekbones actually write the songs. The left one won a Grammy. (Amazon Prime)

I Can Still Hear You Saying You’ll Never Break… These Deals on Prime!

Daisy Jones is a story of the soaring romance only song can capture, the part of the art that never really manifests in real life. But as a story, it’s nothing groundbreaking. It’s Once, in 1970s America. The songs will stay in your head longer than the story.

Maybe all the drama that we assign to the backstages of great art isn’t so dramatic. Rumours is about a messy breakup, but you’d be hard-put to characterize Buckingham and Nicks as a great romance. A subset of Beatles fans believe that Yoko Ono sliced a rift between the childhood friends, instead of the obvious fact they broke up because they didn’t want to tour and disagreed over whether or not to hire Allen Klein as their manager. Great art is made by regular, even shitty people.

Daisy and Billy are ordinary. Their life is lifted up by songs that sound legendary. In a better time, they would have been rock stars. In a better world, we would all live up to the best of our art.

*Spencer Ellsworth is the author of four novels, many short stories, and endless Internet opinions. He would really like to ride a war mammoth, if you got one.*