Daisy Jones & The Six

“So this is a girl that desperately wants to connect. But there’s no one in her life who is truly interested in who she is, especially not her parents. And it really breaks her. But it is also how she grows up to become an icon. We love broken, beautiful people.”

This paradox of Daisy Jones, voiced by her biographer, is crucial to her characterization. Fans love that Daisy is like a phoenix rising from the ashes, but they expect a certain level of disfunction from their rock stars. Daisy is an icon not despite her difficult childhood but because of it. Daisy must navigate her life knowing that she is broken but that in order to be successful, she must stay broken. 

“Billy Dunne was a rock star. You could just see it. He was very cocksure, knew who to play to in the crowd. There was an emotion that he brought to his stuff. There’s just a quality that some people have. If you took nine guys, plus Mick Jagger, and you put them in a lineup, someone who had never heard of the Rolling Stones before could still point to Jagger and say, ‘That’s the rock star.’ Billy had that.”

This characterization of Billy provided Rod, by The Six’s manager, is important for two reasons. One, it succinctly expresses the star quality that make Billy successful, sometimes makes his other band mates jealous, and makes him feel invincible in the music world. Secondly, this characterization is like the characterizations of Daisy as having a quality that could not be taught and that drew people to her. This is one of the first moments when the reader can see the parallelism between the two characters.