Daisy the Great on the triumph of friend-first collaboration ahead of recordBar gig

Daisy The Great. // photo by Alexa Ondrush

New York indie duo Daisy the Great is made up of Mina Walker and Kelley Dugan, and over the last few years, the pair have made a name for themselves as purveyors of harmonies for days. Not for nothing have the pair worked with producers such as the legendary Tony Visconti and Catherine Marks, resulting in music which is always moving forward, while always being rooted in melody and acting as a reminder “that the voice in itself is an instrument.”

Daisy the Great’s next album, The Rubber Teeth Talk, is out June 27 via S-Curve Records, and the pair play recordBar on Saturday, April 12. We hopped on Zoom with Mina Walker and Kelley Dugan to discuss making their music.

The Pitch: How excited were you to work with the likes of Tony Visconti and Catherine Marks?

Kelley Dugan: We were excited. Yeah, we met Tony on tour in Europe, which was kind of like a crazy coincidence that we ended up meeting him and then he lives in New York and we live in New York. We ended up going and writing with him, but it was really shocking and awesome and it was a really fun project. We also had our hearts set on working with Catherine for a while, so it was really amazing that we worked together.

Mina Walker: It was cool to work with them both back-to-back ’cause we were planning on working with Catherine. We were writing the album for a long time and in talks about when we would record it and stuff. We thought we would record it in the summer and then we recorded it in the fall and in the middle of writing that album, we met Tony and we were like, “Oh, we wanna make music with you.”

Since we had that summer kind of free, we wrote five songs with Tony and just recorded them and put them out immediately. It was such a different process, writing those songs after we wrote this upcoming album. It felt like when you first start making music–that feeling of you make it and you put it out there and see what happens feeling and it was really cool.

Daisy the Great has this amazing visual style in all of your videos. Does that performance aspect come from the two of you being acting majors when you met?

Kelley Dugan: I think so. We are also always thinking about the music video. Even sometimes while we’re like writing the song, we get off on a tangent about what the music video is. I think we just connect that way and we’re able to share the song’s world in an easy way with imagery and with setting a scene for ourselves.

Mina Walker: I think we’re also just super visual writers and when we write lyrics, I think we always kind of imagine the visuals that’ll go with it. We’re very hands-on with the music videos. I would say we never really give up control. We both are visual artists–I’m a painter –and we’ve always made all this stuff to go with the band ourselves.

When we started making music, we were like, “Well, we have to make music videos,” and put together ideas based on what we could do and what resources we had and stuff like that. As we grew, we wanted to keep that playful energy and be the people that create the entire world of the songs outside of just the music.

How does that translate to onstage performance?

Kelley Dugan: I think one way that it translates is the idea of having a costume or having some element of what we’re wearing that feels like we’re gonna do a show that comes from doing theater and growing up as performing people. I love to have my show outfit be something that brings us in mentally–you put it on and you know that it’s time to do the show.

Mina Walker: It’s also like how we build the set list and how we stage plot everybody. Whether or not we’re dressed crazy or anything, we do a lot of planning on how we play a lot of different instruments and switch them between people throughout the show. We like to build like a pretty nice arc with how we map out the set list and how we talk to the audience and each other. We do like to bring that acting performance into the show.

How has Daisy the Great changed over the years?

Kelley Dugan: We started the band, just the two of us, but pretty quickly we wanted to record a Tiny Desk Concert submission video, so we called over some friends of friends. Two of those people were Bernardo [Ochoa, guitar/bass] and Matti [Dunietz, drums], who are still in our band. That was really the beginning. We’ve had some people move or like turn towards different career paths. In the time that we’ve been a band, we’ve filled those spots, but it happened pretty early on, so the band has been the band for a really, really long time.

We tour in different sizes. Sometimes we tour just as a four piece, which would be Mina and I, and then Nardo and Matti, and then sometimes, sometimes Mina and I just do something alone or do something with just Nardo on guitar or something like that. The full band is Mina and I, and then Nardo and Matti, and then Matt [Lau], who also plays guitar and bass, and then Bri [Archer], who plays synth and who does backup vocals also.

Mina Walker: And they’ve all been in the band since 2017, so it’s been quite a long time. It’s really fun.

The hit that brought you to everybody’s attention was a re-recorded version of that song you did for the Tiny Desk, “Record Player,” that you did with AJR. You’ve done stuff with Illuminati Hotties, you made that EP with Tony Visconti–it just seems like you always are bringing in folks to help you do stuff.

Mina Walker: Yeah, we’re big on collaboration. I think when we started the band, me and Kelley knew we wanted to a big sound with harmony at the center and at the time that we started the band, we didn’t know how to play a lot of instruments. We could play a little bit of ukulele, but like we don’t wanna make ukulele music, so we have been big on collaborating and developing language.

Over the last eight years, we’ve both gotten really good at other instrument. I play the bass in the band now and guitar and Kelly plays keys and guitar and now she’s learning the bass to play on a lot of songs, too. I think that a lot of this is just based on collaborating and learning from each other.

The way that we used to communicate was like, “Play this guitar part [makes guitar noises],” singing it out. We used to tell Matii to like play the drums like he’s building a house or going into the sunset. We came up with ways to communicate and then as we were a band, we learned more and more how to produce the sounds that we wanted to produce.

It just seems like, in every aspect of this band, you all are having a lot of fun–in the videos, making music, just talking to me, you just seem to really enjoy what you do. You really get into it and that’s something different, for a band that’s been around for eight years to be this excited and adding new things as you go along. Is that what makes it fun: getting to add things?

Mina Walker: I mean, it’s always starting from a place of fun. We never really expected that we would be like a band as our careers and I think that whenever we start to stray away from that, we feel bad. At every step of the way, we’re like, “How can this be fun? Where are we in this? Where are all the people that we’re making it with? Who are we talking to?” Having those touchpoints of how to remind yourself why you do what you do. We definitely made this band, because it was so much fun to do.

Kelley Dugan: We started the band just for fun. We had a lot of intense career aspirations, but this form of the band was really just for fun. It’s so funny that that is the thing that was able to take off the easiest. I think that speaks to it a lot, but I think that everything we do is friends making music and we really love to keep it feeling that way. That’s a goal of ours as we keep growing.

Daisy the Great plays recordBar on Saturday, April 12. Details on that show here.