SPOILER alert: This post contains spoilers for Episode 9 of “Daisy Jones & the Six,” titled “Feels Like the First Time.”
At the beginning of Episode 9 of “Daisy Jones & the Six,” viewers are greeted by a needle drop that may seem too good to be true: As Daisy (Riley Keough) wakes up from almost overdosing the night before, Fleetwood Mac‘s “Gold Dust Woman” starts to play.
As the mystical track builds, Daisy realizes that her husband, Nicky (Gavin Drea), abandoned her while she was near death, leaving Daisy in the arms of Billy (Sam Claflin), her bandmate and frequent temptation. While Stevie Nicks sings “is it over now, do you know how?/ Pick up the pieces and go home,” Daisy yells at Nicky to “pack his shit up” and leave while the rest of the Six (Suki Waterhouse, Will Harrison, Josh Whitehouse and Sebastian Chacon) form a united front behind her.
Fans of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book, upon which the series is based, know that the author has been open about Fleetwood Mac serving as her inspiration. Reid said in a video interview with Penguin Books UK that she began the writing process by listening to Fleetwood Mac’s iconic 1977 album “Rumours,” which was ripe with behind-the-scenes drama between bandmates. “It was the beginning of it for me because it’s an album, but… its also a soap opera,” Reid said. “The stories going on between Stevie and Lindsey and the things that were going on between Christine McVie and John McVie were really fascinating, and they show in the music. So I started there.”
Being that “Gold Dust Woman” is the closing track on “Rumours” and alludes to a failed relationship as well as drug use, “Daisy Jones & the Six” music supervisor Frankie Pine felt the song was “made for the scene.”
“That song has a very trippy feel to it, and the way the scene was cut together, it came across as this very slow motion, kind of waking up from this fog like, ‘What happened?’ Because Daisy doesn’t remember anything,” Pine tells PvNew. “And it’s just this realization that something did happen, she just doesn’t know what, and it takes her directly to Billy to find out. In general, that sonic slowness that [the song] had to it — it almost felt like it was made for the scene.”
But given that it’s pretty public knowledge that the series is based on the relationships within Fleetwood Mac, a topic that its band members often avoid — though Lindsey Buckingham did recently post a TikTok of the band’s infamous 1997 performance of “Silver Springs,” which has been trending due to the show — how did Pine secure the sync?
“It’s funny, everybody has these ideas of ‘oh my god, I can’t believe they got that song.’ Most artists are very open to allowing their songs to be used,” Pine says. “We sent a request, obviously I knew it would be expensive because it’s Fleetwood Mac, but I didn’t get the sense that we would be turned down. There wasn’t drug use happening in the scene — on this show, that was the hardest thing. ‘There’s drugs going on in this scene, so I’m not going to approve it,’ which honestly I think is really funny because they were all doing it back then. It’s not a secret. There definitely were some scenes that were tougher to get — this was not one of them.”
For Pine, scoring a Fleetwood Mac sync wasn’t just about nodding to the show’s inspiration, but also placing Daisy Jones & the Six in the context of bands who would have been their contemporaries.
“There’s a loose regard that it’s reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac, but I love the fact that it’s not Fleetwood Mac,” Pine says. “To me, we had to have certain iconic people in this show, so Fleetwood Mac was definitely on the list. We got the Rolling Stones, Boston, Aerosmith. But there were just certain iconic bands from that time period, and [it was] important in telling the story that this band, Daisy Jones & the Six, was in the mix with all of these other bands.”
