Taylor Jenkins Reid’s fictional band Daisy Jones & the Six aren’t so fictional anymore, and neither is their debut album Aurora. Pulled from the pages of her novel of the same name, the album that brought them on a life-changing world tour comes to life with its first real-world single, “Regret Me,” with more to follow when the record arrives alongside the Prime Video series on March 3.
“We finally have Aurora. A stunning, nostalgic, timeless album that captures the drama, pathos, and yearning of the band’s zenith and nadir all in one,” Reid shared in a statement. “A snapshot of time, intoxicating and dangerous. That delicious moment that you know can’t last… Daisy Jones and The Six are real. And they are better than my wildest dreams.”
In the novel, Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) pens “Regret Me” as a kiss-off to her bandmate Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin). Leaning into the notion that women could be powerful enough to not only destroy an entire band á la Yoko Ono but an entire genre, she wrote: “And, baby, when you think of me/I hope it ruins rock ’n’ roll/Regret me.” Billy refused to record it, but the rest of the band sided with Daisy. Moving from the pages to the recording booth, “Regret Me” takes new form as a fiery duet between the band’s two lead vocalists.
Producer Blake Mills, who helmed the creation of Aurora as both writer and producer, reimagined the song through the lens of its fictional 1970s origins with the lyrics flipped into an emotional battlefield. “So go ahead and regret me, but I’m beating you to it,” Billy challenges, backed by Daisy’s vocals. When the heavy guitars pick up, their performances collide: “You regret me and I’ll regret you/You couldn’t handle your liquor and you can’t see the truth/I’m a slippage in the system and I’m perfectly ready to strike/So go ahead and regret me, but I’m not easing up on this mic.”
Mills recruited musicians Phoebe Bridgers, Madison Cunningham, Marcus Mumford, Jackson Browne, and more to co-write the songs Reid dreamed up for Daisy Jones & the Six’s magnum opus Aurora. “I’m not a musician. I hear something in my head, but it’s not anything that anyone could make into a song. So the idea that people are going to create this album is incredibly exciting to me,” Reid told Rolling Stone when the show first got the green light in 2019.
“I was meeting with one of the guys at Amazon, and we were talking about the music, and he was saying he was very daunted by the task of having to create the song ‘Aurora,’” she added. “He was like, ‘You have made it out to be the greatest album of the 1970s!’ And now he has to go figure out a way to make it. I’m just glad it’s not my problem.”
In 2020, Mills told Rolling Stone that there was a sense of excitement in being able to toy with a history that isn’t as concrete as what could be found in a real-life music documentary, like for Daisy Jones & the Six’s musical counterpart Fleetwood Mac. “There’s an opportunity to subvert and create a guitar personality that could have been present in the Seventies, and wasn’t,” Mills said. “People just loved guitar at that point. So I’m trying to find an appreciation for the instrument and try to bend it to my will a little bit. Revisionist history.”
With that, Daisy Jones & the Six are one step closer to being immortalized on screen, in the book, and in the ears of listeners everywhere. “In the early 1970s, a group of kids with stars in their eyes and talent to spare formed a band called Daisy Jones and The Six,” co-creator and executive producer Scott Neustadter shared in a statement. “They would go on to become one of music’s biggest success stories despite – or perhaps because of – their own interpersonal demons.”
He added: “Theirs was a love story: the love of a particular sound, the love of family, the love of your life, and the love you can’t have but also maybe can’t live without… Aurora represents the pinnacle of a short-lived recording career. It also serves as proof – for both the fictional band and the real one who dreamed this up together – that pouring your heart and soul into something you believe in can have a profound effect on the rest of your life.”
Aurora Tracklist:
Aurora
Let Me Down Easy
Kill You To Try
Two Against Three
Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)
Regret Me
You Were Gone
More Fun To Miss
Please
The River
No Words
