Photo by Alexa Ondrush
Daisy the Great, with special guest Benét, performs at A&R Music Bar on Friday, April 4. Doors open at 7pm, music starts at 8pm. Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 at the door.
Daisy the Great‘s music is undoubtedly built on the wonderful voices of Mina Walker and Kelley Dugan whose harmonies are heavenly. Formed in 2016, the band started off releasing buzzworthy, viral singles and videos (like “The Record Player Song,” submitted to the NPR Tiny Desk contest in 2017, which has been streamed 89 million times on Spotify), before dropping their debut full-length, I’m Not Getting Any Taller, in 2019.
Columbus has been a regular tour stop for Daisy the Great since 2022 with the band performing here nine times as both an opening act (half-alive, The Kooks/The Vaccines) and headliner as well as doing an exclusive CD 92.9 Big Room performance before a sold-out show at The Basement in 2023 and performing on back-to-back days at the WonderBus Festival in 2022.
As Mina and Kelley told me when we connected recently on Zoom, their current tour will be shining the spotlight on 2022’s All You Need is Time one last time to make way for touring later this year to support the forthcoming The Rubber Teeth Talk.
The new album marks a change in songwriting for Mina and Kelley who, prior to this, have always started simple with acoustic guitars and voices. This time around, Daisy the Great wanted to see what it would sound like if the entire band was involved in the recording, going for a live feel rather than building tracks after the vocals had been recorded. As evidenced by “Ballerina,” the first single from the new album, this method of writing and recording is a success. Though the album won’t be out until this summer, I’ve had a chance to hear it and there are some absolutely killer tracks both from a vocal performance but from a musical performance as well (current favorite is “Dream Song,” which the band debuted during it’s 2024 tour).
The full conversation that I had with Mina and Kelley will be published on BigTakeover.com closer to the album release in June, but here’s some of the conversation to get you excited about this Friday’s show.
You’re kicking off the U.S. leg of the tour in Columbus, a city that you’re familiar with. You’ve played here on a bill with The Kooks and The Vaccines but, to me, the best bill you were on was when you opened for Duran Duran at WonderBus in 2022.
Mina: Columbus is one of our favorite places.
Kelley: We also played a radio show that night (WonderBus) so we actually played, I think, 3 shows in 24 hours. For the people who made it to all three, you’re the real heroes.
Mina: The day before we opened for Duran Duran, we had a proper Daisy the Great festival slot and then the Duran Duran one, we were opening for them.
As someone who’s been a fan of Duran Duran since the mid-80s, I have to ask, did you get to meet them?
Kelley: We had to leave pretty soon after we played but someone who was watching told us that Duran Duran asked the crowd, “Did you like that Daisy band? They’re great.”
Mina: Anytime we’re in the presence of someone who has had a giant life in music, it’s amazing. And Duran Duran was a shocking group to be able to open for. We were really excited to meet them and they were so sweet and so kind. They’re such rock stars but they’re also nice. We were very starstruck.
Was the radio show you played at the Big Room Bar?
Mina: Yeah. And we’ve played there a couple of time. The last show we there was so fun. It was so late at night. It was like 1am. I remember in the middle of the set, we just made up a song, we just started improvising. There were these dancing skeletons on the TVs at the bar behind the audience so we just started singing about their dancing skulls.
Kelley: And then people started turning around and looking at the TVs and were like, “Wait, there’s skeletons on the TV.”
Your show at the A&R Music Bar is two months before your new album comes out. Did you book this tour before you knew when the album was coming out? Or, did the album release get delayed?
Kelley: The record is coming out on June 27. We were looking at our year, and we really wanted to tour because it’s been a while. Last year, we went on a tour opening for The Kooks in the spring, but otherwise we were really head down and focused on making the record. This period of time is a lot of making music videos and finalizing things for the record. We have the ability to tour and we really wanted to, so we made a tour around the album’s lead single, “Ballerina,” which we’ve been playing on the road for a while. It felt really exciting to be able to put it out. We wanted to go and tour it to give it its own moment because we’ve been waiting for so long to put it out
Mina: I feel like the tour is kind of a ramp up into the album and a moment for us to play some of our last record, and some songs that have come out in the last couple years. Touring once the album comes out will be very album focused so we’re happy to have this tour. This is kind of the last chance to play a lot of songs and play some new songs, because we really like playing some songs that aren’t out yet before they come out. This tour is going to be a nice opportunity to tease a little bit of the album before it comes out.
I’ve heard the new album, The Rubber Teeth Talk, and it’s got a little more grit to it than your older stuff.
Kelley: Definitely with “Ballerina.” As we’ve grown as a band, we’ve been feeling more and more like we want to record the live band sound. When we started, our recordings would start very minimally. They often started with just vocals and then we would add little guitar parts and build it up slowly. The sound felt a lot more delicate most of the time. As we’ve been growing and recording and playing live, and playing big shows, it’s definitely influenced our sound and what we want to hear back when we record new music. “Ballerina” feels heavier. There’s a lot of different genre leanings on the new record. Some songs are delicate, some are in a totally different space. We recorded everything live as a band first and then built on top of that.
Mina: We came in with pretty fleshed out demos that we recorded with our band ahead of time. And then, before we went into the studio with Catherine Marks (boygenius, Wolf Alice, The Big Moon), she came early, we hung out in our drummer’s basement all together and played through all the songs live as a band. Then we workshopped them with Catherine. There were some songs that sounded completely different after workshopping, she’s very focused on making sure the drum pattern was right, making sure the tempo was right. We flipped a lot of songs on their heads, but Catherine still saw our vision of wanting all the songs to be playable when we go out and play them live. That felt really good. The core of the songs were not made piecemeal. It wasn’t like the drummer went in to record, then the bassist went into record, then the guitarist went in to record. We all went into the live room and played the songs together and it really feels that way in the recordings. We wanted it to have a very big, but not super polished, sound. And, vocally, we wanted pretty raw sounding vocals. We talked to Catherine a year before making the record on the phone. We sent her the demos and we talked about it. We were like, “We want to build worlds with these songs and have the live band and the harmonies and the vocals at the center.”
I’ve talked to some bands who have said that with everything they’ve got available in the studio, they’ve recorded some songs that they aren’t able to play live. Will you be able to play all the new songs live the way they sound on the album?
Mina: We’re never married to the recording. We definitely layered a bunch of stuff that we wouldn’t really be able to play live unless we put it in a track. There’s songs that we used to play with tracks that we were like, “Honestly, let’s like rearrange it,” and then figure out how it feels live and what feels the most fun and human to play even if it doesn’t have all of the filling. We figure out how to fill it in different ways. My favorite thing is going to a show and watching the band do their thing live. I don’t care if it sounds exactly like the recording. I just love seeing people making the music in front of me. I think that that’s something that we try to do when we’re touring.
