A few weeks ago I saw a Fleetwood Mac tribute band. They did a nice job, but I was curious what they might have sounded like if they\u2019d tried any originals in a similar style\u2014and then I realized I\u2019d been there and done that already.<\/p>\n
Daisy Jones & The Six<\/i> is a well-crafted 2019 novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid chronicling the meteoric rise and catastrophic implosion of the same-named fictional \u201970s band, clearly based (as Reid has always admitted) on Fleetwood Mac. The book was optioned for a TV adaptation before it had even been published, and a 10-episode miniseries debuted on Amazon Prime in March 2023. One of the major hurdles before production could begin was that the book talks in some detail about a set of songs that didn\u2019t exist, mostly taken from the imaginary band\u2019s one and only album, the chart-topping Rumours <\/i>analog Aurora<\/i>. <\/p>\n
The logical solution was to hire a bunch of pros to work up said songs for the miniseries, which would then be sung by the lead actors, Riley Keogh (granddaughter of Elvis Presley) and Sam Claflin (The Hunger Games, Peaky Blinders<\/i>), playing perpetually smoldering in-love-but-not-together singer-songwriters Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne. What you\u2019ll find here is the studio album the showrunners commissioned from a team led by songwriter\/guitarist\/producer and A-list session pro Blake Mills (Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell), and supported by a who\u2019s-who of session players backing the two lead vocalists.<\/p>\n
The challenge presented to this team was to create an album from the song titles and lyric fragments found in Reid\u2019s manuscript that could credibly pass for a late-seventies Rumours<\/i>-level megahit. It was a tall order, and while Mills and company hit the mark in a number of respects, they somewhat inevitably fell short in others.<\/p>\n
The first half of the album feels mostly on target, with the kickoff title track a clear bullseye: driving drums, slightly weird guitars and sometimes tandem, sometimes unison male and female vocals. The lyrics aren\u2019t especially memorable, but the sound is absolutely there. The indisputably catchy \u201cLet Me Down Easy\u201d again has that distinctive Mac bounce and drive in the rhythm section, not to mention a bitter melancholy in the way both singers deliver lines like \u201cI got you under my skin now \/ Why do you make it so hard?\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cKill You To Try\u201d features quirky guitar and percussion backing intense Claflin vocals, a very Lindsey Buckingham sonic frame; there are appropriate amounts of anger and longing in the vocals, though the lyric is again merely adequate. \u201cTwo Against Three\u201d is a Daisy solo tune that\u2019s pleasant enough\u2014a lament about the love triangle she\u2019s in with Billy and his wife, but feels more like an \u201cadvance the story\u201d number than a standalone song.\u00a0 <\/p>\n
The band\u2019s imagined chart-topping single \u201cLook At Us Now (Honeycomb)\u201d is another highlight, with a pulsing backbeat that\u2019s unashamedly reminiscent of \u201cThe Chain.\u201d When you add sinuously intertwined male and female vocals singing \u201cWe can make a good thing bad,\u201d you have to hand it to them: character brief fulfilled, even if the book describes the song as being more compelling than this concrete rendering could possibly live up to. The thumping \u201cRegret Me\u201d straddles the midpoint of the album with a slightly heavier sound, a little Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers in its bones, leaning on the Hammond organ and jangly guitars. <\/p>\n
From there it\u2019s unfortunately a downhill ride the rest of the way with a series of tunes that come off like filler, obligatory \u201cthere\u2019s a song with this title in the script, so let\u2019s knock one out\u201d tracks. \u201cYou Were Gone\u201d is bland mid-tempo pop-rock; \u201cPlease\u201d is a dark Claflin-sung number about addiction that feels overwrought, and closer \u201cNo Words\u201d is a pensive love ballad. Slightly more memorable are \u201cMore Fun To Miss,\u201d a wounded, wide-open blues rocker where Keogh gets to channel Janis a bit, and \u201cThe River,\u201d a hard-edged, Stonesy rocker with slashing guitar. <\/p>\n
Overall, Mills and his team locate and replicate the sound and vibe of late-seventies Los Angeles pop-rock personified by Rumours<\/i> beautifully; it\u2019s only the songs themselves that tend to fall short in terms of impact. And why wouldn\u2019t they? Rumours<\/i> was an album created by real people occupying a real emotional powder keg. Aurora<\/i> is a group of modern studio pros playing dress-up with the sounds of an era without feeling the feelings of the real people who were there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":34914,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"artist":[10909],"rating":[5612],"class_list":["post-46781","review","type-review","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","artist-daisy-jones-the-six","rating-rating-b-minus"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/review"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46781"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/review\/46781\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"artist","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/artist?post=46781"},{"taxonomy":"rating","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dailyvault.adishjain.in\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rating?post=46781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}