Daisy Jones & the Six is the fictional band at the center of the highly anticipated Amazon Prime Video series of the same name. The series is an adaption of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s New York Times bestselling novel that broke #BookTok and caught the attention of series co-producer Reese Witherspoon.
The series uses an oral history format to create a “rockumentary”-style depiction of a popular rock band’s demise à la Fleetwood Mac, complete with angsty love triangles, sex, drugs and, of course, rock ’n’ roll.
“Daisy Jones & the Six” made its splashy debut on Amazon on Thursday, and released the album created for the series, titled “Aurora,” on the same day.
“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.”
Shortly after both the series and the album dropped, Chart Data tweeted out news of the faux band’s ascent on the very real charts, saying, “.@daisyjonesand6’s ‘AURORA’ has reached #1 on US iTunes.”
Fronting Daisy Jones & the Six is Riley Keough as the captivating Daisy Jones and Sam Claflin as rock star Billy Dunne. Neither actor had sung professionally before, and Keough recently revealed she might have actually stretched the truth when auditioning for the role.
People reported that during a recent screening of the series, the actress — who is the daughter of Lisa Marie Presley and the granddaughter of the king of rock ‘n’ roll himself, Elvis — admitted, “I auditioned like everybody else, and lied to them and told them l could sing.”
The series co-creator and co-showrunner Scott Neustadter spoke with The Times’ Screen Gab this week and revealed that the band went through an 18-month band camp before filming began.
“Our feeling was that, no matter how great the sets look or how well written the scene, if we can’t convince you that Daisy Jones & the Six are a real band, we’ve got nothing,” Neustadter told The Times. “That meant putting the actors through a rigorous ‘band camp,’ run by [music supervisor] Frankie [Pine] and supervised by [music consultant] Tony [Berg], where for hours every day they would practice their instruments, learn Blake [Mills’] brand-new songs, work on their stage presence or otherwise just shoot the s— like real bandmates do.
“That was supposed to last a couple weeks,” he continued. “But because of COVID, we couldn’t start our production on time, and the three-week band camp turned into 18 months. By the time we started in fall 2021, the actors weren’t just a convincing facsimile of a rock band, they were a rock band.”