Do you want some rock’n’roll in your life? Some spice in a little bit mundane-repetitive-boring covid-19-year? Do you want to experience all the ups and downs of being in the band without actually sacrificing your real, maybe comfortable life? Well, then, there is one way to do it – read the brilliant book Daisy Jones & The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid – or wait for the screen adaptation of it this year. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
I have been hearing about this book for a year now, seeing all the book bloggers promoting it on social media. I read the description and knew I wanted to read it, but I kept postponing it till this month. I started reading it last week and finished the whole book in a few days. It was that good! I could definitely say that I haven’t read anything like that before.
Not trying to spoil it for anyone, but the format of this book is truly something unique for a fiction story. Reid creates a fictional rock band and tells their story in a non-fiction format. How cool, right? It is fiction, but written in a non-fictional way. The epic journey of the rock band is told by … drumroll …. musicians themselves! The whole book is one big-ass – sorry for my French – interview of everyone involved in the creation and management of the band’s success. There is no narrator. There is no standard start of the chapter: setting, mood, situation. We follow the unraveling of the story by simply listening to everyone’s perception of it. All the voices are heard equally, and the plot becomes so multifold because of that. Sometimes you don’t know who to believe in the story – and that’s exactly the point. In life, don’t we all have our own versions of the same event? Don’t we all have subjective experience of exactly the same thing? Isn’t our memory beautifully flawed? The book plays with our minds and our preferences. It is us who get to choose which side to take in a conflict and what character to sympathize with. We have the agency. Or at least that’s what the author skilfully wants us to believe.
In this book, you get everything: intense drama, reality TV show, the glamour of famous and rich, the harsh reality of being in a rock band, the hardworking process of songwriting and recording. It is all there. You will read this book in two days, but you will experience the lifetime of emotions.
Music is not my forte. Reading and writing are my passions, and I can say I am more or less knowledgeable in both. Music, though, is something I am pretty uneducated in. And this book opened the door to me to the world of good, really good music. It demystified the process of creating great music. Making music is really less about drugs and spontaneous inspiration, but much more about disciplined, laborious, patient, devoted, and damn hard work behind closed doors, with zero entertainment. Every art is only partly momentous: for the rest, and most, part it is intentional. And songwriting is very similar to book writing: you can be inspired by one moment, but it takes hours, days, and sometimes years to make it a reality.
Daisy Jones & The Six is pure rock’n’roll. If you want to be part of it – read the book. Hear the music.
