When Daisy the Great closed out their tour last April at Preserving Underground in New Kensington, the indie pop/rock duo didn’t take a ton of time off, getting to work almost immediately on new music.
“In the year since we last talked, we made a record, which was really exciting. We made an EP as well. I feel like I wouldn’t have expected that it would have happened in this way and the things that we got up to. I don’t know if I thought it would really be as cool as it was,” Kelley Dugan said with a laugh. “But we had an awesome year. We made an EP with Tony Visconti and then we recorded our upcoming record with Catherine Marks. We had a lot of band time to work on the music, which was really exciting.
“In years past, we’ve been on the road a lot and this past year we had more of a chance to stay home and work on music and make the record we wanted to make. So it’s been very creative and very exciting. We’re really looking forward to putting the music out.”
The EP, “Spectacle: Daisy the Great vs. Tony Visconti” came out in September, and the new full-length, “The Rubber Teeth Talk,” is set for a June 27 release. Their Ballerina tour — named for a recent single — hits Preserving Underground on Saturday, with Benet opening the show.
Although they’ve played a handful of shows in the past year, both Dugan and Mina Walker sounded equally excited to hit the road for a proper tour again.
”I miss playing shows. I miss meeting everyone,” Walker said. “I love meeting people that come to the shows. … I just miss playing the songs. Really, my favorite part of the band is playing the music. And I’m really, really excited to do that again.”
So does Walker prefer performing to writing music?
“No, I’m saying favorite loose,” she said with a laugh. “I love all of it. I think when we’re touring a lot, I miss writing. And when I’m writing a lot, I miss touring. I really like doing both, the creation of the music and the performance of it. I’m really excited though to perform because we’re going to be playing some new stuff and it’s always fun to see how a song lives in the world.”
The duo, who have been playing together since 2016 when they met at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, will be playing tracks from the new album, even though it won’t be out for almost three months.
“I don’t know if I feel scared. I feel excited. I definitely feel nervous, but I trust that our audience will get us. They’ll know what’s up,” Dugan said. “We’ve played some of the songs on tour as well, even while we were writing some of the songs. We like to play new stuff, so we have thrown a few into the set already over the past two years. And usually the reaction is really excited, too. So I feel excited to share, and I’m happy to be able to give them the songs soon because I feel like it’s always such a weird feeling to be holding the music and know that it’s coming out, but you can’t really share it yet. So I think it’s nice if you come to tour, you’ll get to get it a little earlier than everyone else. You can take a video of us playing it.”
“It definitely feels nice this time,” Walker said. “I don’t think we’ve ever had this where we’re playing new songs and we can be like, ‘They’ll be all ready for you on (June) 27!’
“Normally, we’re like, ‘We just wrote this and we just want to play it,” Dugan said. “So here we go.’”
“‘We haven’t recorded it yet. It’ll come out in three years,’ like that type of situation,” Walker added.
In a Zoom chat last week from their Brooklyn homes, Dugan and Walker talked about the inspiration for the new album, their guitarist from Pittsburgh and more:
With the new album, are there any certain themes that you’re exploring?
Walker: Yes. Very dream world heavy, I would say. I think we play a lot with the feeling in your dreams where you don’t have that feeling of doubt, the ability to do things in dreams that you can’t do. I don’t know, I feel like in my dreams, I’m not — I mean, sometimes I am, which is concerning — scrolling on my phone in dreams. I think in dreams, we play a lot with that consciousness that’s like you just accept the things that are happening in dreams, even though they’re absurd.
Dugan: I think that the way that the dreams fit in, there are a couple of songs that are inspired by dreams — well, a few of them are dreams — and then one of them is like I went to the dentist and they gave me way too much laughing gas and I tripped out in my head. That whole experience is also in one of the songs, but I think that it feels like all confronting something unknown, and I think, in your dreams, that can feel like something really huge and imaginative and grand. Then in the smaller moments on the record, it’s like more life, things that are really real but feel scary or unknown or feel like there’s doubt or insecurity in that. And we are learning from our dream selves in moments how to show up for the moments that are more real in your real life. But I would say, confronting the unknown, dreams. We’re feeling quite playful on the record, so we’re really building worlds, song to song, and letting our imaginative side be free. At least while we were writing, it felt that way.
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Walker: And then the second half of the record is more about some somber stuff. There’s one song that’s about death, and there’s another song about what you do for the rest of your life.
Dugan: The existential questions.
Walker: We got that existential dread in the second half of the album.
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“Bird Bones” would be the song about death, right? Was that about somebody in particular? Are there still constant reminders of that person?
Walker: Yeah, “Bird Bones” is about our friend who passed away, and she was really into taxidermy. Right after she died, I was walking over this bridge, and I saw this whole bird of bones, and I was like, wow. It just really reminded me of things that she would be excited about. And just seeing something physical left over from something that has passed, I felt inspired to write about that. I think that my friend, it’s interesting because she was sick, so she kind of knew that she would leave earlier than you would think. And I think that she really wanted to be remembered. And I was like, it’s so crazy because like, you literally can’t forget. If anything, when somebody dies, they become more present.
You also mentioned about the unknown, and that’s what I got out of “Rest Of My Life.” Are you thinking about yourselves in the future and the legacy that you leave behind?
Dugan: I think legacy in a big sense, but also just with your people around you. That song is really special, and it started out as a different song. And then it found its way into this setting. But yeah, the second half of the record feels like, now that we’ve had this journey in the front half, when you are quieter, what are you thinking about? Not that the songs are necessarily quieter, but if you’re quieter in yourself, what kind of big questions do you think of? And “Rest Of My Life” is a question of, am I going to be OK? Will the people that I love stay around me? And sometimes no. Sometimes that isn’t what happens. And hopefully, you’re able to stick around with the people that you love, but it’s a more gentle wish in that song. And knowing that like things have happened that are different already.
Walker: And that you’re still a hero.
With “Ballerina,” the first single, was there anything that sparked that? Were either of you ballerinas growing up?
Dugan: I was in ballet.
Walker: I was a dancer. And yeah, I think there’s that. I mean, I feel like I heard over and over again, a ballerina can only be a ballerina till they’re like 32 or something and then their career’s over. That feeling of just being an awkward child and trying to do ballet and just feeling like that’s just like not what your body does. But “Ballerina,” I think even if you’re not a ballerina, which I was not, I did weird dancing and stuff when I was a kid, but I was not that type of ballerina. (laughs) But I think that was something that seemed utterly impossible. Even if I wanted to do it, it felt like something that — it does exist. It’s a real thing that exists that people are, so it’s like this image of perfection. But it’s something that is very just not actually attainable for most people. And even when it is attainable, it ends very quickly. But it represents that thing that you compare yourself to and you put in other people.
Your guitarist, Bernardo Ochoa, is from Pittsburgh, so how did you link up with him?
Dugan: We met Nardo while we all went to school at NYU, but Nardo was in music and we were in acting school then. Then toward the end of school we met through our friend, Jake Sheriff, who recorded our first EP and our first album with us, and Jake runs Paper Moon Records, which is a label in New York. We met Nardo and we asked him to play a version of “The Record Player Song” with us for our Tiny Desk concert submission video that we wanted to put up on YouTube. And so we taught Nardo “Record Player Song” and then we were like, would you want to be in our band? If we made a band for real and played shows for real, would you want to be in it? And then we played a few shows with him. Maybe we played one show with him before we made the video, but we met him through friends and then kind of quickly we’re like, if we were a real band in some weird world where that actually happens, would you want to play with us? And then he said, sure. So then he joined the band and he’s been in the band ever since.
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Walker: I think he wanted to be in the band because we asked him to play the bass, which he is a guitarist and he was really excited to be asked to be a bassist because he never played bass in bands. And we already had a friend playing guitar because everyone we knew only played guitar. Nardo played bass for the first few years of Daisy and then slowly pivoted to being the guitarist again because we were like, listen Nardo, you’re very good at bass, but you’re very good at guitar. Could you switch over? (laughs)