It’s just a couple of weeks since Jack and Daisy dropped their charming debut EP Barcelona (In the rearview). With their warm, stripped-back sound and heartfelt songwriting, they’ve already caught the attention of Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart who is backing their journey. Splitting their time between the stunning landscapes of Spain and the vibrant music scene in the UK, Jack and Daisy are carving out a sound that feels grounded and quietly bold.
The EP blends self-discovery with a message of being happy in the moment. On the honest and homely title track the melodies rise and fall through the soft harmonising vocals. On the accompanying video, you join Jack and Daisy on a drive in a Spanish sunset, delivering an emotional performance that gets to the sentiment of the song.
‘Life Go Easier On Me’ is a heartwrenching cry about the day-to-day stresses that can leave us feeling so fragile. The lyrics are both calming and assertive, conveying a message in the hope of finding relief and hope for the future. But despite its darker message, the track is bouncy and relieving, a reminder that we are not alone in our struggles.
‘Another Day’ starts with a beautiful, shimmery guitar line, Daisy’s vocals shine throughout, speaking to our hearts for life to calm down through the everyday. The EP ends with Bob Dylan’s ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’. They have covered Bob Dylan before on their popular YouTube channel, but this is one of their best takes yet, giving the song a fresh relevance.
What does this debut EP mean for you both?
Jack: It feels like the right time, it feels like the right thing to be releasing because it’s kind of like we’ve finally found our sound and what we have been striving to sound like, so for us it’s just, couldn’t be better today.’
Are there any particular themes or stories you wanted to get across? I found it nostalgic but also feeling that life could be better if I ran away, but actually, you are in a good place.’
Daisy: That’s exactly it, ‘Another Day’, it’s saying, ‘Oh I’m finally getting to these places that I’ve hoped to be at, but actually I’m kind of just waiting to go home or just missing that familiarity’. But then ‘Barcelona’ is different, it’s more about where you hope to to get and moving on to something different, something new, and it was actually inspired by a chat with Dave Stewart, and he was telling us about when he first arrived in New York for the first time ever with Annie and when they came over the mountain and saw the skyline. That’s always the bucket list thing about us is to make it to New York, so that was really nice.
That’s really nice. I’m sure you guys will make it to New York. Is there anywhere that you particularly like to play in New York or is New York the goal?
Daisy: There’s a lyric that’s ‘To see the Café Roi.’ And it’s a really famous café. Bob Dylan used to play there. Bruce Springsteen used to work there. They used to do these folk nights and they still do music nights. So to do like a little show there would be, if you actually, we thought it was quite funny because Timothée Chalamet did this Bob Dylan movie the other day. In the very first scene of him arriving in New York, in the background, you see a big sign that says The Café Watt. And we’re like, how?
Jack: Yeah, this is after we wrote the song.
Daisy: We were like, great. It’s even more relevant now.
Are there any other dream venues that you guys would like to play at?
Daisy: I think that it’s just to play as much as possible, as many places as possible at the moment. Our main thing is playing live, that’s how we started out, what we do basically every day, and it’s how we make our living. To play in places where and with audiences that are really into the music is just always lush for us.
Do you find that audiences connect with different songs depending on what country you’re in?
Daisy: They are very different. And it’s mostly because when we do shows in Spain, we go to like the cities, we’ll go to Madrid, Barcelona, because it’s a mainly Spanish audience, I feel like they connect to what would be the more upbeat kind of poppier sounding songs, because sometimes some of the lyrics might get lost on them or something. It’s not their native language. Luckily, all the shows we’ve been doing [In London] are really intimate. Everyone’s so quiet and it feels like the slower and prettier the song, the more people are like focused, whereas in Spain, I feel like they tend to drift off a bit if they don’t really get the meaning of the song and then when you bring in happy rhythm and melody, start dancing.
What was it like playing in St Barnabas Chapel Soho last Christmas?
Daisy: It was cold. It was so cold. It was like two weeks before Christmas, I think. Oh, and they tried to turn the heating on, but, you need a lot of heating to heat up a church like that. It was lovely, really nice. Everyone was so quiet and we got to share this stage with amazing people; they were very intimidating. Not the artists themselves, they were lovely, they were so friendly, which made it even more intimidating.
Jack: It was artists that I had on like my Spotify wrapped, it was very crazy.
Daisy: We got told we got confirmed a week before the show that we were going to do it. But we didn’t know until maybe two days before who else we were playing with. So we got our Spotify wrapped and it was like, oh, one of your top 10 most listened to songs is Billy Martin. And then the next day we got a message like, oh, you’re playing with Billy Martin tomorrow. And we’re like, OK, cool.
Jack: She was lovely, though.
Daisy: She was. Everyone was so nice.
Are there any songs that you wrote that didn’t make the cut for the EP?
Daisy: We have hundreds or so that have never seen the light of day, and hopefully never will, but it was really easy for us to choose the right songs for this, this is probably the easiest time creating and songwriting we’ve ever had because we just like, did it all.
Jack: Well, almost all of it was with. Dave Stewart, there was a lot of back and forth, a lot of zoom calls, a lot of him just calling us at midnight because he’s based in Nashville or the Bahamas, so there’s always that time difference. So he’d call us and we’d be in bed, like yeah we’d be like ‘hello, yeah we are awake, yeah we are awake’ like we’d both be asleep, and you get the call, like it’s Dave, you gotta wake up. He’d just want a chat, it wasn’t anything to do with music. He’s been like, ‘oh what did you have for dinner?
Daisy: He’s very lovely, two of the songs were co-written and we didn’t even have a discussion about what we want the whole EP to be about or anything, it just kind of came together.
Jack: Obviously we had a theme in mind without knowing it, kind of like we knew what we wanted to about, and especially with Dave’s collaboration and his history, having been in a similar situation, so it just worked out.
Is there a track on the EP that felt like a breakthrough creatively? Did you find that you’re pushing yourself more creatively in other aspects that you haven’t done before?
Daisy – I think we wrote ‘Barcelona’ and ‘Life Goes Easier on Me’ with Dave, and then literally after those sessions with him, we kind of felt like we just leveled up and found a new kind of rhythm. Sometimes you get a bit stuck, but we did these couple of sessions with Dave and it just felt like oh. And then ‘Another Day’ was the third song we wrote, and we had that guitar part for so long before this, and it was we loved the guitar part and we were like ‘we’re not going to throw this away’ even though like we tried so many times, but then after these sessions with Dave, we sat down together and we wrote ‘Another Day’ in a morning, and it was just like finally, like we’ve been able to do this yeah justice, like this song. And our manager said to us, he said ‘you might have shot yourselves in because we at this point we’d already decided that ‘Barcelona’ was going to be the title track and the music video that came out on July 11th.
Daisy, I heard that you can play classical Spanish guitar?
Daisy: Yeah, I was classically trained in Spanish guitar when I was growing up, but actually like it was in England, ironic as for me, a dad who loves everything about Spain, like growing up in Spain and in the UK, and my dad was always a big musician guitar player, I taught myself, the acoustic guitar, but I was classically trained in classical guitar, and that’s that’s something that you can still use now. It’s funny because the guitars we play are actually made by classical guitar luthiers, but they’re acoustic guitars. And it’s just like, it’s that familiarity for me. So, yeah, that’s it. Something a bit strange, but yeah, that’s so nice.
Do you think it influences how you write?
Daisy: I think it’s just because every song we write is so just… whatever comes up in the moment. I’m sure it must influence it in a way, but you don’t notice when you’re doing it, yeah. Unless you’re directly thinking, ‘oh, let’s go for Spanish guitar.’
What is a fact that your fans might not know about the both of you?
Jack: Before we even knew each other, when we actually lived in the same tiny town, when we met we were both bass players in different bands, That’s kind of weird.
Your cover of Bob Dylan at the end, ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’. Why did you pick that song?
Daisy: Well, we actually did a different Bob Dylan cover on YouTube of ‘Don’t Think Twice’, which is now over a million views. It blew up. And then so we originally wanted to release that, well re-release it and then Dave was like well you know there have been loads of covers of that and you guys do the ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ really well as well because we posted that as well and that message is like so current and it’s very relevant song and it does fit in with the the kind of vibe with the album or the EP certainly.
Jack: So we’re torn between that one and what was the other one? It wasn’t a Dylan song. Well, there wasn’t a change he wanted.
Daisy: I don’t know, Simon and Garfunkel.
Jack: Oh, he wanted ‘The Boxer’.
Daisy – Yeah, but we were like, the EP is more kind of influenced by Dylan and like James Taylor and all that. So yeah, it was definitely going to be a Dylan cover. And I think ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ just fit the best and we love playing that live as well; it’s so powerful.
Who are your main influences for your EP?
Jack: James Taylor, Bob Dylan.
Daisy: I was like Damien Rice as well because we always say that because he’s just so straight back and more and emotional.
Jack: We love his album, O, it was famously recorded on a little eight-track. He’d just been dropped by his record label. And it’s one of the most, like Daisy said, raw and it just sounds so beautiful. And there’s so little done to it. And that’s kind of what we wanted with this album is that it has elements when it goes into instrumental parts to fill out the space and stuff like that, but we do try and keep it really minimum so that if you do come and see us live, it does sound pretty much the same on a good day always.
What are you hoping people take from this EP?
Jack: I feel like I just hope people, how do you say it? It’s like I feel like stripped back music’s coming, making a comeback with the rise of AI and stuff like that. I feel like people are becoming a little bit distrusting of certain music. So to hear something so stripped back, I hope people relate to it more a little bit. It’s not trying to pander.
Daisy: We’re not trying to make a poppy hit, I hope it resonates with young people as well. ‘Barcelona’ is quite a hopeful song, and hopefully that can resonate. But, you know, even if it just makes someone somewhere feel something, then that’s good. As long as someone feels something positive.
Do you have any upcoming shows?
Daisy: We’re hoping to have a mini tour in the UK at the end of September. The dates are all to be confirmed.
Jack: Dave’s on his way back from New York to Southampton because they’re doing Sunderland was named Music City of the UK this year, and that’s where Dave’s from. So we’re hoping to play that with Dave, and then do more shows around that.
Daisy: But it’s all still to be confirmed. We need to wait for the EP to be released before, that’s exciting!