SALT LAKE CITY, Utah, Feb. 8, 2024 (Gephardt Daily) — Folk-inflected indie-rock band Daisy the Great is making a tour stop at the Union Event Center next month as part of the 15th anniversary tour of English pop rock band The Kooks.
Also on the Inside In/Inside Out tour, which will visit Salt Lake City March 19, is English indie rock band The Vaccines.
Daisy the Great is led by singer-songwriters Kelley Nicole Dugan and Mina Walker. Dugan, who is from New York, and Walker, who grew up in New Orleans, first met as acting majors at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, where they began co-writing a musical about a fictional band before realizing they wanted to make that happen in real life. The pair set out as Daisy the Great, eventually growing into a six-piece outfit.
They recorded a Tiny Desk Concert submission of “The Record Player Song” in 2017, the same year the single was officially released. The song has since racked up over 28 million streams on Spotify and had multiple viral moments on TikTok.
Daisy the Great’s debut LP, “I’m Not Getting Any Taller,” followed in 2019, and the band released the quarantine-born “Soft Songs” EP the following year. Then came “Record Player,” a summer 2021 collaboration with indie pop group AJR, where the two bands went into the studio to write some new verses to pair with the original hook. That song has been streamed on Spotify more than 67 million times.
After a full summer of shows and festivals, including Lollapalooza and Firefly, Daisy the Great put out their sophomore album “All You Need is Time” in the fall of 2022, then followed it up with a successful U.S. headline tour in spring 2023. The band then headed to the U.K. and Europe in fall of 2023 to continue their headline run; Dugan and Walker have also toured with AJR and Half Alive, and opened for The Happy Fits, Indigo Girls, Sidney Gish, and Samia.
Dugan and Walker chatted with me over the phone from Brooklyn before the tour begins Feb. 29 in Atlanta.
Dugan’s mother is an opera singer, while Walker’s is a jazz singer, and her late father was a visual artist. We asked the two how growing up in creative families shaped their idea of what they wanted to do with their lives.
“It’s interesting; I grew up in a very creative family,” Walker explained. “My dad was a painter, and he passed when I was 6 years old. But he had taught my mom how to paint and she is a painter and a caricature artist. She’s also a singer, a jazz singer. And she’s very obsessed with musicals. So I think from a young age, I was introduced mostly to musicals and theater performance, which is interesting because I grew up singing those songs and feeling an urge to be a performer and that being the material that was kind of around me, but also feeling like I didn’t quite fit into that or that it was exactly like, the way that I wanted to perform.
“And I think I later discovered songwriting when I was a little bit more around people that were songwriting. I was like, oh, this is something that there’s a possibility that wasn’t around me that much when I was little, when I was like, performing a lot of school plays and stuff and singing, like classical music and stuff. I think that I got introduced more into songwriting in my later teen years, and mostly after college, honestly. It was really nice, like the whole time being encouraged by my family to be creative. And I think for me, it took a while to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with that.”
Dugan added: “I think we both grew up doing a lot of theater, and I think that informs our music in a really fun way a lot of the time. I grew up; my mom was an opera singer. Similarly, I was really just kind of surrounded by music and art when I was growing up, and I feel like a lot of the things that I did were either about art or music. I would play the piano and sing and do musicals and I really just gravitated towards that; there was never really a question honestly about what I was wanting to do. But over the course of growing up I definitely spent time digging into different creative areas. When I was really little I was really, really into art. For a really long time I was really into musical theater, which I’m still into but it just kind of comes out in a different way.
“And then when I was a teenager, I started writing songs and acting. We met in acting school actually. So I felt very drawn to a lot of different things. This is kind of interesting, like we really are 100% focused on the band right now and playing music in this way and it’s interesting to see how those other aspects of our creativity like want to crawl in in different areas. Like Mina does a lot of the art and our posters and when we make a music video a lot of the time we’re directing and like creative directing and acting in them and I think we just try to like squish in as much of ourselves into the project as we can, and our creativity comes in in a lot of like, secret ways.”
Walker added: “In our crafting of the live show, we try to be very meticulous when we’re making a setlist and how we’re going to keep people interested in the show the whole time, like also make the show, even though it’s a collage of songs, have an arc and a story, which comes from our live performance background. We really try to build a story out of a set and when we have different size sets sometimes, like a 30 minute set sometimes or sometimes you have an hour-and-a-half and it’s like OK, how do we show all of our sides within a limited time, and how do we keep people interested when we have tons of time.”
We also asked the two what their first impressions were of each other and whether they hit it off immediately.
Dugan said: “So we were never actually in the same class, like our acting school started off with about 70 people then that dwindled as some people decided to pursue something else in a different space of the college. So initially, there were four classes of the 70 and we were never ever in the same class. We had some mutual friends and we would be at the same party but we didn’t get a chance to actually fully know each other like….”
Walker added: “Kelley was in the same group as my best friend and so I kind of, I would meet Kelley through them, and Kelley was doing music before me. She had a solo show, and I remember our whole school went and I remember seeing her and I was like wow, that’s really cool, that she writes music and performs in New York. I was just like that, that seems so foreign to me and really exciting and really made me go oh, I’m gonna do that; Kelley’s really talented and a cool songwriter. I think that was the first year I wanted to do that. I didn’t really know Kelley that well but I went to go see that. We were friendly and had like a lot of the same friends, but our core friend group was kind of different.”
In their third year, the two finally ended up in the same class.
“We had an assignment for this sketch comedy class, I think that we both really, I don’t want to write a sketch sketch, but maybe we could write a song sketch instead, because I saw that Kelley sung and I was like, I sing too, so let’s write a song for this, to like dodge the assignment,” Walker said. “So we wrote a song, it was funny, it was like very stupid, but it was funny, we had like two ukuleles, and we wore these long velvet cloaks that Kelley used to wear, like a duster. We both wore them, and they definitely looked better on Kelley than on me. And then we graduated college and I was like, I like working with Kelley.”
Walker added: “I graduated a semester early because I had done some summer work, and then Kelley was in like a part-time semester, and I was only working at my day job, and I was really poor and I was like OK, I want to make something. So I texted Kelley and I was like, we should write a musical. And we met every single day at the Marlton Hotel in Manhattan because it was close to where Kelley was working. And we would meet there for like six hours a day and like, only order coffee and fries and just write this musical about a band. And then we were like, well we wrote the whole script, and then we were like, OK, we need songs for the band. And then we started showing each other songs that we had written. And we were like, oh, these are good, let’s start a band, rather than pretending to be a band in a musical. So we scrapped the musical and we started telling people we were a band and they started asking us if we would play at their parties. We didn’t really know any people in music; we knew like a couple people in music. Mostly our friends were acting students from our school so we would go to parties and play and people would talk to us while we were trying to sing a song. Eventually we started asking venues if we could play there and building a band with more than just a guitar. (It was) kind of like learning to be a band, and I think, over time, we really developed our sound and our goals.”
When the band headlines a show it’s usually a six-piece, but for this tour, it will be a four-piece. Dugan and Walker said they haven’t yet met the other bands they are heading out on tour with;The Kooks and The Vaccines.
“We’re super excited to be on this tour,” Dugan said. “We’re changing our set list; for the last couple of tours our set list has been a little bit similar, we’re going to play some of the same songs obviously, but we’ve been writing a record, so we’re gonna play a few new songs, try some out. We try to capture all the moods of our music in the limited time that we have, so some really high energy moments and some really like intimate small moments.”
We also asked the two whether they write when they are on tour or if they usually wait until they return home to write and record.
“A lot of the time we will jot down lyrics or voice memos when we’re on tour, most of the time we will compile that later, once we’re back and have access to like, our music setup and stuff,” Dugan said. “But when we’re on tour we’re just kind of constantly like making little notes of ideas about songs and when it’s time to write, we’ll open up our notes or our journal and try to start putting some things together. Sometimes we do write a whole song because we’re in the car for so long.”
She added: “We do try to have times when we’re on tour and really dive into writing. Basically, since we got back from the Europe tour in October, we’ve been writing pretty nonstop. I think we just have to remember we kind of set a rule that when we’re not touring we’re writing, because when you are touring, it is hard to get down demos.”
When the two get off this current tour, they plan to keep shaping the music they are developing currently.
Finally, I asked the two what other than music brings them joy.
“I like to go for walks, I like to go for really long walks,” Dugan said. “I like to hang out with my mom. I like to go to dance class. That’s definitely really joyful. And I like art, I like seeing movies, I love movies.” Walker added: “I really like crochet, so I’ve been like making clothes which has been really fun. I like to paint, I like to watch movies, hang out with my with my partner. I like to read a lot, I value alone time a lot. I feel like I also just really like writing music with the band; it’s been really nice to have a little bit of a break from touring and be able to hang out with the band all day and write songs and then have my alone time as well.”
And the name Daisy the Great? Dugan and Walker say they were walking in Manhattan one day and brainstorming names and that one came up; the two have said the name represents something delicate while emphasizing the power in it.
For more information on Daisy the Great and tickets to the Salt Lake show, click here.
