Daisy secures the vote to record Regret Me

Daisy Jones secures a vote to record “Regret Me” by bringing the song directly to the band after Billy Dunne rejects it. What begins as an argument over one track becomes a public test of who can decide what the group makes: Billy can refuse to record the song himself, but he cannot prevent the others from choosing it. The result is both a creative victory for Daisy and a sharp rupture in the band’s working relationship.

A Song on Paper

The dispute begins with an improvised manuscript rather than a finished studio arrangement. Daisy presents Billy with a song scrawled across a napkin and the back of what he recalls as a bill, the writing blurred with black eyeliner. He reads it once and says they are not recording it. When she asks why, he closes the open window before answering only, “Because.” The abrupt refusal makes the disagreement plain without explaining it; Daisy has to supply the case Billy withholds.

Her argument has five parts. She says the song is good, and that Billy had recently wanted something harder and less romantic. The band needs another track; she does not want to keep writing with him; the song already fits the melody of a blues shuffle he has been working on; and, most important to her, the album’s tension needs a break. In her account, the song is not an unrelated provocation but a piece that can complete the album’s movement. Its fit with Billy’s existing musical idea also makes his rejection harder to separate from their personal conflict.

Daisy later explains that she had rehearsed the argument on the way over. Billy remembers that it was difficult to answer, although he still tried. Their opposing accounts give the exchange a revealing shape: she arrives prepared to turn a private refusal into a decision the whole band can make, while he experiences that move as a challenge to his authority.

The Vote in the Lounge

Daisy does not settle the dispute in the conversation by the window. She gathers the band in the lounge and announces that she will sing the song, after which they will vote on whether it should be recorded for the album. Billy recalls finding everyone assembled and feeling angry enough to go cold. The choice of a group vote changes the stakes: this is no longer only Billy and Daisy negotiating a track together. The other musicians are being asked to make their judgment visible.

She sings without accompaniment, giving the song as she hears it in her head. Its words address the damage between singer and addressee, and its central image is that even remembering her should spoil rock ’n’ roll. Karen describes Daisy’s voice as guttural and scratchy, and says she seemed drunk or buzzed. For Karen, those qualities intensify the song’s anger rather than obscure it. Eddie hears rock ’n’ roll in the performance; Warren says the line about ruining rock ’n’ roll is what convinces him the song is great. The testimony does not reduce the performance to a polished demonstration. Its force lies partly in its roughness and in the anger the band can hear in it.

Billy expects the silence after Daisy finishes to mean the others dislike the song. Instead, Daisy calls for a show of hands. Karen raises hers immediately because she wants to play on a song that would let her rock out onstage. Eddie votes for it, and Pete does as well; Pete is drawn to its dangerous quality amid material he considers comparatively soft. Graham initially feels he should support Billy, but also thinks the song is good, and eventually raises his hand. The musicians do not all describe their reasons in the same way, but their votes converge.

A Decision Against Billy

Once Graham joins the others, Daisy tells Billy that the vote is six against one. Billy nods to her and to the group, then walks away. The vote makes the band’s creative-democracy agreement consequential: Billy’s resistance does not become a veto. Yet the scene does not present that outcome as frictionless equality. He is the lone dissenter, and the song proceeds without him. Eddie confirms that they recorded it without Billy, turning the vote into an immediate practical consequence rather than a symbolic argument alone.

The action also reverses the expected balance of power between the two principal songwriters. Billy can refuse Daisy’s proposal in their private exchange, but her performance persuades the musicians to act without his consent. The others’ response is not simply an endorsement of Daisy as a person: their testimony points to the song’s anger, its musical energy, and the contrast it offers with softer album material. The vote therefore establishes that the band can recognize a track’s value even when its central authority opposes it.

The Recording Changes Again

The decision to record “Regret Me” without Billy is not the final account of his involvement in the song. During later work on the album, Teddy Price pushes him to add a second vocal layer, although Billy initially resists. Billy then rewrites and records the main riff, while he and Teddy pull Warren Rhodes’s drums back until the pre-chorus. Artie Snyder recalls that those changes transform the song. The later recording therefore complicates the image left by the lounge: Billy’s walkout marks a real break in the decision-making process, but not permanent exclusion from the song’s creation.

That afterlife preserves the scene’s central tension. Daisy wins the right to have the song recorded, and the band’s vote confirms that her creative judgment can prevail over Billy’s refusal. Later, Billy’s work helps shape the track that results. The event is thus not a simple transfer of authorship from one songwriter to another. It exposes a conflict over control, makes the band’s collective decision-making audible, and leaves the music itself carrying contributions from both sides of the dispute.