Indie pop/rock band Daisy the Great discusses their formation, going viral and sequel songs

With one semester left at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, Kelley Dugan and Mina Walker started writing a musical about a fake band for fun.

That musical — with pop stars being struck by lightning, masked singers and much more — will never see the light of day, but it did lead to the formation of their indie pop/rock band, Daisy the Great.

“The day that we started showing each other music and harmonizing on each other’s music, we never talked about the musical ever again,” Dugan recalled in a phone call earlier this month from the road. “We’re like, let’s just be a band instead. I think that the musical was a bit of giving us the ability to pretend to be a band. And then we’re like, we can just pretend to be a band in real life. We don’t even have to have a musical to do it.

“So, yeah, then the band started basically the first day that we harmonized on each other’s music. And we started booking shows, and we tried to convince everyone that we would be a real band,” she said with a laugh. “And now it’s been a very long time and it feels more real, but it still kind of seems like it’s really just a pretend band that we somehow convinced everyone was real.”

Daisy the Great just finished up a stint opening for The Kooks and The Vaccines ahead of a few headline dates, including their tour finale on April 2 at Preserving Underground in New Kensington.

”We love headlining … When we have opening sets that are 30 minutes, we have to make some sacrifices in terms of the setlist,” Walker said. “I think that especially our music has a lot of different, like we play with a lot of different genres and styles, so I think that when we have more time, we’re able to move through a lot of different energy levels and moods in the set.”

The band surpassed 250 million worldwide streams of their 2017 single, “The Record Player Song,” which landed on their 2018 EP, “I’ve Got A Few Friends & I Wish They Were Mine.” Their full-length debut, “I’m Not Getting Any Taller,” followed in 2019,

“I feel like when we started, we weren’t really looking to other bands so much for inspiration,” said Walker, who cited Fiona Apple as an early creative influence. “I think we were just getting stuff out of our system, which is, I think, why our first album and EP are so weird. Our songwriting was very impulsive — I think that’s the right word for it.”

Then came another EP, “Soft Songs,” in 2020, and another studio album, “All You Need is Time,” in 2022. Their most recent EP, “Tough Kid,” dropped in October.

Among that prolific output was a collaboration with labelmates AJR, reimagining the hooky chorus from “The Record Player Song” into “Record Player” (which has more than 3 million views on YouTube). The chorus also went viral on TikTok in a “one-breath challenge.”

“It was on TikTok, which is so funny because we didn’t even have TikTok and a fan put it on TikTok and messaged us like, ‘Oh, I hope this is OK. It’s doing really well. Like, I hope that that’s OK,’” Dugan said. “And we were like, ‘What?’ And so we had to download TikTok to be like, what is going on? But yeah, it was really exciting.”

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Although social media helped their career trajectory, there are also traps of technology that they address in “Looking U Up” from their latest EP.

“‘Looking U Up’ is definitely about dating on social media. It’s about being stuck on your phone and about how people can exist in your phone in a way that is not real. There’s so much of our interaction that happens on our phones now … It makes everyone really stuck and obsessed with being on their phone,” Dugan said. “So the song is about how you can have this idea of someone, and it’s like you’re looking them up or whatever it is, you’re like having another version of them that you’re creating or that you’re like feeding somehow by being able to see what they’re doing. But you’re not actually necessarily talking to them and even if you’re trying to put them to the side — like in the song, there’s some lyrics about how maybe this relationship is not that great for you. But because you’re obsessed with your phone and because you’re stuck on your phone, you just can’t get out of that cycle.”

Beyond the two versions of the aforementioned “Record Player,” they’ve also created continuations of other songs, too. “Glitter 2” is a more chill, hazy reimagining of “Glitter”, while “Time Machine 2” is a spirited run-through of “Time Machine” with another indie rock band, Illuminati Hotties.

”We wanted to make sequels to the songs, I think, because especially ‘Glitter’ and ‘Time Machine,’ lyrically, I feel like there’s multiple sides to the feeling of the lyrics. And I think that in the album we highlight a specific energy of the lyrics and I think that we wanted to see how we could musically change the songs and highlight maybe other aspects of the meanings of a song,” Walker said. “Because ‘Glitter’ is about staying up really late at night and I think that the original plays with a very playful and chaotic energy that you get when you stay up all night, like running around the house energy. And I think that we wanted to highlight the more somber, sad, dreamy aspect of staying up really late at night so we thought it would be cool to make a little more — for lack of a better word — emo version of the song.

“We made ‘Time Machine,’ and it’s a song about the end of the world which I think is becoming more and more relevant in our lives,” she said with a laugh, “because the end of the world seems closer than ever at the moment. But the original is very beautiful and cinematic, and I think that we wanted to make a more messy version of it and a more high-energy, faster version that felt like it kind of encapsulated more of the chaos of the world ending. We also really wanted to collaborate with the Illuminati Hotties because we really like what Sarah Tudzin does, so we thought that that would be a good way to highlight that energy of the song.

“When we were making this ‘Tough Kid’ EP, we were trying to wrap up the era of the ‘All You Need Is Time’ album and also kind of hint at what’s to come, and I think that making new versions of old songs is kind of hinting at sounds that might show up in the next era of Daisy the Great.”