Midnights

“Midnights,” initially called “Memories,” is a song Billy Dunne wrote about his happy memories with Camila Dunne and later reshaped with Daisy Jones. Daisy’s revision changed both its subject and its structure: what began as a straightforward, personal song became a more ambiguous meditation on what can and cannot be remembered, with space for a second voice.

Origin and discovery

Billy wrote the song over the summer for the album. A few days after an encounter at Teddy Price’s pool house, Daisy found the page among her belongings at home; she believed she had packed it by mistake. She reread it repeatedly, then began writing over the lyrics. In her view, the song was already good, but needed some darkness.

Daisy described the original as sweet and centered on Billy’s happy memories with Camila. She saw potential in it, but approached the page as material to alter rather than a finished statement. The change began privately, with her reading and marking up Billy’s words before bringing the altered song back to him.

A change in meaning and form

When Daisy handed Billy the page, its pen marks made much of the writing difficult to read. His first response was to ask what she had done to his song; he also told her he could not make out what she had written. Daisy took the page back, put her hand on the guitar neck to stop him, and asked him to listen from the beginning as she sang her version.

The revision redirected the song from happy memories toward the boundary between remembering and forgetting. Billy judged the result more subtle, complicated, and open to interpretation than his original. Daisy said she had not changed much of the song’s substance: she added the idea of what is not remembered to bring the remembered parts into sharper relief, and restructured it to include a second voice. The transformation therefore came through both a shift in subject and a change in how the song could be sung.

Shared composition

Billy’s acceptance of the revision showed itself in action. Once Daisy had sung it, he became excited, took the page, and began rearranging it with a pen. Daisy recognized that immediate return to writing as a sign that he liked what she had done. Their exchange turned the marked-up sheet into a shared working document: Daisy introduced a new emotional direction, and Billy continued shaping the arrangement on the page.

They then played the song for the rest of the group in the studio lounge, with Daisy and Billy and a guitar. Graham Dunne liked it and began discussing a guitar solo for the bridge with Billy; the two were in agreement about that part. The account thus traces the song beyond the pair’s initial exchange, showing the band beginning to consider how its revised form might work musically.

Significance

The song’s development recasts a piece about Billy Dunne’s memories of Camila Dunne without simply removing that personal origin. Daisy’s addition of the forgotten or unrecalled gives the memories a counterweight, while her second-voice structure makes room for a perspective beyond Billy’s alone. As Billy and Daisy worked on it together, the song came to mean more than the subject he had started with.

“Midnights” also makes the mechanics of their creative partnership unusually visible: a song is found by mistake, read over and over, overwritten, sung back, and then rearranged by its original writer. The result is not presented as Daisy replacing Billy’s idea, but as an exchange in which her intervention opens the song and his response develops it. Their first presentation to the band carries that private revision into a collective musical decision.