Growing towards the light with Daisy Jone
Does the best music invite us to celebrate our sin or to reach for redemption?
In Daisy Jones & The Six, Amazon Prime’s new mockumentary drama about a fictional 1970s band, the two lead singers disagree.
Daisy Jones is charismatic and chaotic. She numbs the pain of past rejection with late-night parties, casual relationships, and a cocktail of pills washed down with champagne.
Billy Dunne has survived a stint in rehab. Now, along with his band The Six, he is trying to conquer the world of rock and roll without embracing the accompanying wild lifestyle. Instead, his life and lyrics focus on his wife and young daughter.
Daisy and Billy first collaborate on ‘Honeycomb’, Billy’s song about redemption for letting people down. Daisy objects to its sweet, clean message, thinking it dishonest. She transforms his lyric, ‘I know we can get it all back’ into, ‘We can make a good thing bad’. Ironically, in doing so, she makes the song better, and it soon reaches number one.
As another band member observes, it seems that ‘rock and roll should be passion, pain, anger. Sleeping with some girl you don’t know. Not making sweet love to your wife.’
Following their chart-topping success, The Six invite Daisy to join the band, and so begins a battle between tender, faithful, sober Billy and honest, messy, raw Daisy. The resulting artistic and romantic tension captivates fans but threatens to tear the band – and Billy’s marriage – apart.
As the years pass, Billy becomes increasingly fraught, convinced that he cannot keep running from his brokenness. But Daisy, like all flowers, ultimately grows towards the light. By the end of the series, she is desperate not to let her own brokenness define her. Addressing a packed stadium of fans, she implores them, ‘If you’re lucky enough to find somebody who lifts you up, even when you don’t deserve it, that’s where the light is… find someone who helps you see the light.’
As Christians, we can go one step further. Whether from a stadium stage, or in a dinner-table conversation with family, how can you urge those on your frontlines towards the Light of the world, who always lifts us up when we don’t deserve it? How can you reflect his love, which acknowledges people’s weaknesses and flaws, while still offering hope and redemption? With Jesus’ help, perhaps this week your conversations, like the best songs, can be both honest and tender, raw and yet full of redemption.
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Rachel Smith
Rachel is a part-time writer and a full-time mum. She attends King’s Church Durham.