This Could Get Ugly

This Could Get Ugly began with a guitar riff and became one of Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne’s clearest demonstrations of what they could recognize in each other. Daisy supplied its central idea and lyrics; Billy, who said he could not have written the song himself, accepted her finished work without changing a word. The song’s subject—knowing someone deeply, even in ways that person’s partner may not—gave their collaboration an intimacy that was also difficult to contain within the music.

Origin and Writing

The song grew from a musical idea Billy and Graham Dunne had developed together: a guitar riff they liked. Billy then went to Daisy to ask whether she had something for it. The route from riff to finished song therefore crossed the band’s shared work before becoming a focused collaboration between Daisy and Billy.

Daisy approached “ugly” as a positive idea. She wanted to write about the confidence of knowing that someone’s nature or motives were legible to her, even if that person did not realize she understood him. When Daisy and Billy met at Teddy Price’s place, she brought material shaped partly by a man she was seeing. Billy remembered being struck by one of her lines, which imagines making a list of future regrets and placing the speaker at the top, smoking a cigarette. The source of Daisy’s material was personal, but the song’s force for Billy came from its wider ability to name a feeling he recognized.

Billy described the finished song as Daisy’s idea and execution, and praised it as excellent. He felt that she had written something that seemed as though he could have written it, while knowing that he could not have produced it himself. That distinction mattered: the song felt intimate to him without being his creation. He said he did nothing but praise Daisy and did not change a single word. His response made the collaboration itself part of the song’s significance: Daisy’s work gave Billy a way to recognize something within himself that he had not independently expressed.

What the Song Says

Daisy’s conception reverses the ordinary negative sense of the title. “Ugly” is not simply a warning that a relationship will become destructive; it is also a quality the speaker recognizes in another person and claims to share. The surviving lyric fragment makes that mutual recognition explicit: “The ugly you got in you / Well, I got it, too.” Rather than presenting one person as an observer of another’s flaws, the lines make recognition reciprocal. The speaker sees something difficult in the other person and admits to possessing it as well.

Daisy later placed the song among several numbers that made the emotional stakes of singing with Billy unusually charged. She described Young Stars as concerning two people drawn to each other but compelled to deny it, and Turn It Off as concerning the attempt to fall out of love with someone who remains loved. This Could Get Ugly, by contrast, was about knowing someone even better than that person’s partner did. In Daisy’s account, these were not neutral subjects to perform together: singing them brought up what she had felt while writing them.

That meaning also affected Daisy’s relationship with Nicky. She said he was often jealous of what happened onstage, and described making sure he felt comfortable and happy as a significant part of their relationship. The song’s claim to a particular kind of knowledge therefore carried consequences beyond the writing room. Its subject could sound like an artistic idea, but its performance beside Billy risked making that idea seem personally pointed.

Reception and the SNL Plans

The song’s importance grew as the band’s public profile rose. By the time Daisy Jones & The Six appeared on Saturday Night Live, Young Stars had reached number seven on the charts, and Runner Records was selling albums faster than it could print them. Runner had identified This Could Get Ugly as the next prospective hit. Its planned placement on the broadcast was therefore both a promotional decision and a choice to foreground a song whose emotional implications were conspicuous.

The plan was to open with Turn It Off and perform This Could Get Ugly second. Both songs went well at dress rehearsal. Daisy and Billy were also speaking to each other during dress, a change that Karen noticed. The rehearsal success might have suggested that the broadcast would follow the prepared sequence, but Billy proposed a last-minute alteration: instead of This Could Get Ugly, he wanted to perform A Hope Like You, a slow ballad, with himself at the keys and Daisy alone with him onstage. The proposed pairing displaced Karen from the keyboard role for that number, though she understood the effect Billy was aiming for even as she disliked it. The band’s account distinguishes the song’s successful rehearsal from the different performance choice made for the show.

Performance and Significance

This Could Get Ugly is significant not just as a song Runner hoped to turn into a hit, but as evidence of how Daisy and Billy’s artistic recognition could be understood in more than one register. Billy heard Daisy’s writing as capable of expressing something he felt but could not have composed himself. Daisy, in turn, understood the song as a statement about unusually close knowledge of another person. Their collaboration joined those meanings without making them identical: her authorship remained intact, while his response made the song personally resonant to him.

The title’s tension between attraction and discomfort also helps explain why the song was a dicey choice for the pair to sing together. In Daisy’s description, the work’s subject could imply a closeness that a romantic partner might resent; onstage, that implication became part of the audience-facing performance. Yet the broadcast plan changed before the final set, and the evidence preserves the song’s rehearsal and intended place rather than claiming that it was performed on the show. Its role in the band’s story thus rests on both what the song articulates and the charged performance context surrounding it: a private-seeming form of recognition carried into collaborative work and considered for a national television audience.