DAISY THE GREAT SPEAKS TO SELF DISCOVERY AND IDENTITY ON “PERSEPHONE”
photo by Sara Laufer
Striking a masterful balance of poetry, metaphor, and simply stating the truth, Daisy the Great’s music is at once uniquely playful and reminiscent of well-loved classic folk. The duo’s lush harmonies form the unmistakable backbone of their songs, which, lyrically, explore the nuances of crafting identities, uncovering true selves, and, ultimately, growing up.
Mina Walker and Kelley Nicole Dugan’s first project together was an assignment for a comedy class they were both taking at the time while studying acting at NYU. The two eventually started writing a musical together; for hours on end, they’d sit in the café of a nearby hotel and write, and, after sharing a few songs, they realized the potential that their partnership had unlocked. “Pretty immediately, we were like, oh, this is really an excellent situation,” Kelley explains, laughing. “We started off writing together by bringing in stuff that we'd already written and reworking it as a duo,” Mina adds.
After putting a small band together with some friends, they decided to make a Tiny Desk submission with “The Record Player Song” which, as Mina notes, was one of the only five songs they had at the time. Kelley had been playing around with the song for a few years already and describes its themes as “recognizing the absurdity mixed with the heartache of not feeling like you're fully there and fully living your life and being a person.” It stayed unfinished for a while, but she eventually completed it with a new time-developed perspective: “I think I needed that time to build empathy for myself and be able to call myself out with love and not feel so personal about it.”
Just as their older music like “The Record Player Song” holds incontestably reflective tones, their most recent EP “soft songs” serves as a relic of uncertain times in and of itself. Unlike their other tracks, Mina explains, the songs in their EP were written over FaceTime, and she and Kelley sang and played nearly all the parts of each song. “I spent a lot of time just kind of noodling around and making guitar lines… I’d send [Kelley] a barebones track of the guitar ideas that I had, and maybe a hook or something,” she continues. “It’s the simplest thing we've ever done; we just sent it all over to our friend, Jake Sheriff, who made our first EP and album. We were like, ‘can you just mix it and master it, please? We're gonna put it out. I know there's the sound of a car in it but…’” Kelley laughs and chimes in, agreeing that the EP was, much like everything else in the past year, quite unexpected.
The rawness of their music is not only found in its sonics, though. Mina tells me, “I used to bury meaning in metaphors; I would just stack metaphors on top of each other so that nobody could actually know what I was saying, but it sounded cool. I was afraid of being like ‘this is exactly what I mean,’ because that's probably the scariest thing to do: just to actually say how you're feeling.” Today, she and Kelley write lyrics that perfectly balance metaphor with blunt storytelling to capture the inner workings of their minds.
Ever since their first song together in college, Mina and Kelley have never let go of what brought them together. “We were talking about this the other day; in growing up and in becoming more confident with what we're writing like the most important thing to us is to still have a childlike worldview and a playful attitude towards whatever it is that we're trying to say,” Kelley explains, as Mina adds that their music freezes a moment in time to capture the “liminal space between being a kid being an adult.” Smiling over her cup of coffee, she tells a story of recording their first EP: “When we recorded that EP, we rented out this barn recording studio overnight.” They had 24 hours to record, but they all worked during the day, so, as she explains “we were like, okay, let's just do it from 8pm to 8am. We did vocals for that song on no sleep at like six in the morning… I woke up from sleeping on the couch and was like okay. Let's sing.”
Matilda Sakamoto in the “Persephone” music video
Almost five years after their first project in comedy class – with an album and numerous EPs and singles under their belt – the two are in the process of crafting their second studio album. Their most recent release is a two-sided single including a cover of “Scarborough Fair” and their newest song “Persephone.” Kelley explains the original myth of Persephone and the direction that she and Mina let it guide them in:
“The sirens requested to have wings in order to be able to search for Persephone when she was taken to the underworld. So, “Persephone” started off, basically, by thinking about the fact that we know about sirens and the siren song and everything about sirens trapping men and trying to lure them to their death, essentially. I was really inspired by this idea that, rather than singing to try and trap these people, that the sirens are calling out to Persephone. And so that calling out and looking for someone that they have lost or that they miss is an entirely different activity than trying to lure these men to the rocks and whatever that side of the story is… Persephone as an idea can be someone else, but it can also be that Persephone is another version of yourself. In dealing with identity – as we often are – you are inundated with other people's ideas of you, and at the same time [you’re] longing for something that is real and longing for something that is true and gross. Just fully the actual version of yourself.”
A lulling melody and strikingly rich harmonies build into the haunting siren song that is “Persephone”. Its accompanying music video perfectly encapsulates the song’s story of finding, as Mina describes, the “truest freest messiest version” of oneself. Kelley and Mina directed the video, which features dancer/choreographer Matilda Sakamoto. The song, along with “Scarborough Fair” and the rest of Daisy the Great’s discography, is available on all music streaming platforms. The music video, which premiered along with the song on 2/11, can be found on Youtube here.
