On ‘All You Need is Time,’ Daisy The Great Celebrates Early Adulthood’s Uncertainty
Photo by Eva Smittle / Courtesy of the artist
Indie rock duo Daisy The Great blend luscious harmonies and theatrical influences to produce music that packs a punch — taking up space and filling a room — while still being soft and delicate. The result is an unmistakable sound that demands to be listened to.
The Brooklyn-based band, composed of Kelley Nicole Dugan and Mina Walker, first captured audiences with masterful vocal layering in the 2018 release of “The Record Player Song.” Their debut record from 2019, I’m Not Getting Any Taller, encapsulates the feeling of growing up through soft, bright, heartfelt melodies like “Dips” – which sounds like a sun-drenched day and falling in love in your early 20’s.
The duo’s sophomore release, All You Need is Time, comes out today, October 28. It features metaphorically brilliant singles like “Aluminum,” which candidly depict the challenges of early adulthood — namely, the process of growing up and having a dynamic self-perception. In the track’s accompanying music video, these struggles are depicted through a set of older twins who have a rocky relationship. Dugan and Walker believe that this represents “feeling stuck behind a version of yourself that doesn’t feel like you at your core.” The album’s narrative experiments with these themes, especially self-reflection and self-development, while dissecting the big question: “Okay, now I'm an adult, and like … what's going on?”
Over Zoom, I chatted with Dugan and Walker about Daisy the Great’s growth, musical influences, and what inspired “Aluminum.”
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Bianca Vasile: I know that you two met at New York University (NYU). Can you tell me about what inspired you to start making music together?
Mina Walker: The reason we started working together was because of a class that we had to write something for. Kelley was a songwriter outside of school. She and I had been like, songwriting kind of secretly. And when we graduated, I said, “Let's work on something together.” We started with the idea of writing a musical together, about a band. And then we were like, “Oh, the band should have indie rock songs.” We realized that being a band sounds way better than writing a musical. So, I reached out to some musicians that I knew from the music school at NYU, and we got together.
The first time the band all played together, we were making a video because we were submitting “Record Player” to Tiny Desk. We learned it in an hour, and then made a video. We started faking our way into stuff, and have definitely evolved a lot since then.
You’re both currently living in Brooklyn. Do you feel like the city itself has influenced the music that you're creating and releasing?
Walker: A lot of our friends are super talented musicians and we all learn from each other. We also have our classical influences. I think that over time, the more you discover, the more your tastes change, the more that your art changes with it.
Do you have any musical influences you held on to growing up?
Dugan: My mom was a singer. From the time I was a little kid, I knew that I was a singer and wanted to sing forever. Growing up, I also was into acting. So I was kind of like, “Oh, I don't know what I want to do.” I was constantly trying to prove that I could do both theater and music at the same time. I was deciding around college if I wanted to go to a music school or an acting school and I decided that it would be cool to go to an acting school. I loved doing it. But, basically, as soon as we got out of school, we were like, “Let's do music,” which is funny, but it definitely influences us in cool ways.
Walker: I didn't. Being in a band felt like such an arbitrary thing to me when I was younger. I knew I wanted to be a performer. The only thing I really felt like I had access to was theater and musicals, and I always felt like I didn't quite fit in, especially vocally. Or — I never felt connected to it. I always felt like I was kind of taking the passion I had for musicals just because I wanted to sing. But I really didn't feel like I fit in very well.
My mom was really into musicals. I would make these songs on my computer that were these weird vocal layers and stuff. I would use my voice as an instrument. Then towards the end of college, I kind of discovered the indie scene in New York. When we started writing songs I started to feel like I could fully sing in my voice and I wasn't putting on a voice or like, a performance of myself. And I think it was the most I felt like myself.
How did you navigate the creation of your 2018 EP, I've Got a Few Friends and I Wish They Were Mine, having never done that before?
Dugan: The songwriting process was definitely the easiest part of it. We had a musical and we were deciding what the band was gonna play. We were like, “Oh, this feels like an EP or something.” So by the time we were like, “Let's make an EP,” the songs were already written.
We teamed up with our friend Jake Cheriff, who produced and mixed that first EP, and also our LP after. We recorded it in this place called Mama Coco's, inside of a barn inside of a furniture store. It worked out and sounded cool. Really fun, challenging in certain ways. And like, so easy in other ways.
Walker: It was just fun. We had no expectations. We didn't really know about the industry or anything. We just had our friends and we were having fun and making it because we were like: this is the coolest thing to do. I think that's something that we try to access now. Or at least, I feel like I miss it a lot.
You had great success with your 2018 song, “The Record Player Song.” Has the growth of your fanbase affected the process of creating new music?
Walker: Well, luckily we made the new album before like, two years ago. We were very bad at going to the studio. When we released our LP, we were already playing completely new songs. The live show was completely different from all the music we had out. People were like, “When are they coming out?” And we hadn’t even recorded them! Now we’re finally releasing them. It's been fun to do a slower rollout so we can give every song its moment. It’s been so long already. It’s like, why rush it now?
To preface your new album, you first released “Glitter,” “Cry In The Mirror,” and most recently, “Aluminum.” Can you tell me more about the intention behind the order of the singles?
Dugan: We release songs when we feel like they’d be good to listen to. It’s just kind of been on a whim.
Walker: The album has a lot of different flavors and goes to a lot of different places. I think some of the softer, more intimate songs that we did will be really nice on the album. There's some very delicate, awesome songs that aren't singles that I'm really excited for people to listen to. You'll notice when it's out, why we chose the flow of it because there's definitely a story there.
What do you hope that listeners feel with the release of your newest album, All You Need is Time?
Dugan: We're pretty consistently concerned with time. I feel like we're very involved with our brain in the world. Like, our brain and what it means to be a person. The past record is more of what it means to grow up. But this one feels a little bit more like, “Okay, like now I'm an adult, and like … What's going on?”
Walker: It’s about having to reckon with the fact that you are an adult, and still have all of these questions about what it means to be a person. I think that the story of the album is like, you should feel some type of internal journey, and then relief. You're left with a question at the end, that I think makes you want to listen to the album again.
Dugan: It celebrates and accepts that there are questions that you can't answer and there are things that don't have a right way to do them. Or, that there's a certain amount of acceptance that you have to have about having the questions. I hope that people feel like they are not alone.
I do think that the album has a bigger sound because, as Mina was saying, we were playing these live shows that felt super rocky and giant, and the music that we had out was a lot more delicate. I think with this record, I get a lot more energy from it. I also think there's a lot of big, rocky, cathartic moments that I'm really excited to play live — like songs that are just really big-feeling.
In your song “Persephone,” you sing: “The plight of the siren is that everyone is always scared of a powerful woman.” Can you talk about the process of writing lyrics, and the use of metaphors like this in your songs?
Dugan: “Persephone” is such a funny one, because I started it based on this weird subplot of a myth that everyone comments that I'm wrong about. Everyone that watches the video thinks that Matilda, who's the dancer in the video, is Persephone. But the song is actually about a siren.
The song is based on this idea that the sirens were given wings to be able to search for Persephone. There's a story that Persephone was taken to the underworld. The sirens were her handmaidens, and they were given wings in order to be able to search for her. But then there's all this lore about sirens luring the sailors to death by singing and calling out for them. But I wanted to write the song pointing out that we know sirens as dangerous, beautiful creatures that are luring these men. But, what if they are just people calling out for a lost friend, or a lost love? That is Persephone. The sirens’ focus is on Persephone, not on the sailors. They have to deal with everybody saying that they have this agenda to lure men in.
Walker: I think it's connected to “Aluminum,” because it's about how the way people perceive you is totally out of your control, and that this perception of you exists. And learning to be yourself, outside of how you exist in the world.
Your other songs deal with more vulnerable topics. Do either of you find it difficult to let people into your inner thoughts and doubts?
Dugan: I think that with some songs, just by working on them with each other, it makes it a little less scary to put out. We’ll have an initial first step of: “I have this lyric idea,” or, “I have this seed of a song,” or, “Here’s the whole song that I made.” There are definitely songs that are like, “This one is like super literal to my life, and that is scary.” Definitely. But I think you just go for it if you're willing to go for it.
Walker: There's definitely stuff we've written where we're like, “That's a personal song, and it honestly isn't very good.” Maybe it’s something that speaks to just me, or, this idea needs some fine tuning. But I think with most songs that we make together we're like, “This is something that is happening to you, and [it] also speaks to me, [and] so [it] will also speak to many other people.”
Dugan: It's also cool because there are songs that we've written together, and we both have a completely different read on. It's cool to put out something like that because then you're like, what is everyone going to think?
Walker: Kelley will say, “This first song is devastating.” And I’ll think, “This song is the most fun thing!”
You change your relationship to the meaning of your own songs over time. We used to cover a Lucy Dacus song, “Night Shift,” where she says, “In five years I hope the songs feel like covers / Dedicated to new lovers.” And I think that line always stuck with me because your songs do start to feel like covers over time. You have a relationship with a song when you produce it, and when you put it out into the world. Then you listen to it once you've been playing for years and think, honestly, what does this mean to me now?
We have a lot of different age groups who are fans of us. And it's interesting what a song means to someone who is 16 versus 45. We have people who respond to these songs in different ways. And when you're at different points in life, things can feel nostalgic, hopeful, or things can feel devastating.
What direction do you see your music going, in the future?
Walker: We want our next sound to be rockier. So energetic live, that you can’t help but bounce around and dance. We’re in a phase of wanting to lean into a punk rock sound and see what that feels like. “Record Player” was vocally challenging in a harmonic sense, because we had to focus on pitch and stuff. But I think we want stuff that feels like we can scream it.
Dugan: We’re getting a little less polite and a little less worried as we get used to performing. There’s songs on this record that are hard. And that’s really fun to me — I want to have more of that on the next record.
Walker: This record that’s coming out — I think the word to describe it would be ‘luscious.’ And next, I want to go gritty. This album is meticulous, and I want to scream and run around a little bit in the next one.