There is less than a month now before the release of Daisychain’s debut album All In A Name on June 27th. The DIY Chicago-based psych-rockers are on the road and they pack a punch with their clash of groovy psychedelic rifts, smooth bluesy guitars, hard-rock echoes, and so much more.
Daisychain are Nickole Regala, Frankie Sripada, and Sophia Williams. And their forthcoming debut album was the band’s first endeavor with drummer John Merikoski. The album was produced by Sylvia Massy who has worked with artists such as Prince, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Johhny Cash, and more.
Daisychain’s music can be be described like organized chaos. They aren’t restraining themselves to one sound that feels comfortable for the sake of an album narrative. They aren’t taking one step up the stairs at a time. They’re jumping five steps at a time and doing kangaroo hops back down for fun.
Between singles and EP’s released since 2019, you hear several different sounds, genre, emphasis, and punctuations in their music. Their forthcoming album is no different. Their music is somehow calm and electric. It’s decadent, drowsy chamomile tea and it’s bitter, push-you-out-of-bed coffee.
The band came together when Nickole Regara and Sophia Williams met at a dive bar in Chicago, then looping in Frankie Sripada. In DIY or maybe more aptly punk rock fashion, the band keeps a sound where every instrument, every vocal, every minute detail has equal space but seems to bring in something entirely different every moment.
They’re the psychedelic version of “Flight of the Bumblebee”.
They hit the road for the “She’s A Freak Tour” on the 22nd of May and keep going until June where they” take a break before the launch of the new album.
The most recent release is “Waste Your Time”, a single from the aforementioned album. The track is a groovy track that has riffs bouncing in your ears like waves hit a beach on high tide.
The song is a perfect example of how the guitars are in conversation with Regala’s triumphant vocals.
John Merikoski’s drums serve as a guide for the perfect storm of Daisychain’s pysch-symphonies.
You can pre-order the All In A Name vinyl here and pre-save the album on your streaming platform of choice here.
In an interview with Sophia Williams and Frankie Sripada of Daisychain, we talked about the process of making their debut album, the difficulty of putting a label on their music, and more. This interview was conducted via Zoom and has been edited for clarity and length.
Antonio Villaseñor-Baca: You have a lot of exciting stuff coming up very soon: the tour starting on the 22nd, album releasing towards the end of June. How are y’all feeling? What’s running through your mind?
Sophia Williams: Super nervous, excited, happy to get it out there, but, you know, we put a lot of work into the album and the prep leading up to it. So it’s gonna be cool.
Frankie Sripada: Yeah, it’s the way I feel about a lot of these things, until it happens, it’s almost like you’re still at the airport, you’re not on the plane going to the destination, until it’s about to happen. You don’t necessarily feel it, but it’s very exciting. It’s every musician’s goal or dream to like make an album, and it was a multi -year process and now that we’re finally getting to share it with people, it seems like all of the the reception so far has been really strong and the
anticipation has been really good.
Yeah, I saw that y ‘all just got the test pressings for the vinyl. Did that make it feel a little bit more real?
Sophia: Yeah, just getting a physical copy of it and the ritual of putting a record on a record player, setting yourself up for the whole process of listening to it was very cool.
The tour starts a little bit before the album release. I actually think it ends with the release party. The first thing that stood out was why is it the “She’s a Freak Tour” instead of “All in the Name like the album? I think that’s a lyric from the song “Rivers.” Is there something that you wanted to highlight by naming the tour that?
Sophia: Well, I think our first thought about it and there’s more to it than that, but we
wanted to announce the tour before we announced the album, so we didn’t want to
give away the name of the album. And we wanted the tour to just be sort of like
a cohesive thing that we’re working on in the summer and then drop the album at
the end of it.
Frankie: And we’re also releasing the single, “Rivers”, and its video during the tour.
Sophia: Yeah, so it’ll come together once that’s announced and make a little bit more cohesive sense.
Can you tell me a little bit more in detail about how the band came to be? The band formed in 2017. I love the line in the band’s bio that said, “this album showcases Daisychain’s complexities as people, tight-knit bond as friends and versatility as artists”. Can you talk a little bit about that and being in a band that got so close so quickly?
Sophia: I started going to a dive bar in Chicago that’s synonymous with live music and open mic nights. And I went there with the intent to start a band and I met Nickole. Frankie, I had known for a while, and I always thought he was a great guitarist.
Frankie: We were kind of running in the same circle of people, going to shows and getting in the trouble. She introduced me to Nickole and at a certain point there was some show in Nashville that was supposed to happen that wound up not happening. But I said “hey, if you need a guitar player, let me know” and the next thing you know she was picking me up for practice like a week later and here we are. And there was a different drummer at that time, we’ve kind of got have a bit of a Spinal Tap situation with drummers but it’s always been the three of us since then.
Sophia: We’ve become super tight knit, as anyone would touring together so often, being in a band together, being really vulnerable working on like creative projects together…
Frankie: Meeting each other’s families.
Sophia: Yeah. It’s very much a personal relationship just as much as it is a business or work
relationship or creative relationship.
Yeah, definitely that’s a band, right?
Sophia: Yeah, my god. The ups and downs, good and bad.
Now, if the band came to be around 2017, can you paint a little bit of a timeline for how this album in its current iteration and the project that it’s finally being published- how long this has been in the works? What has that process been like?
Frankie: I think the earliest that we were working on songs for this album was late 2022. And in the summer of 2023, that was when we sat down like, okay, what’s the next step here? We’ve got two EPs, we’ve got a single. What are we trying to do next in a serious way? A full-length album, for the artistic spirit of what we wanted to do, that’s what was the obvious next thing as a musician and we wanted to go all out with it. We made a short list of people we’d love to work with for the album. You pick out 10 or 20 and hope that one gets back to you and we we had more than one get back to us but Sylvia Massy was definitely at the top of our list.
Sophia: I was just pretty stunned by that. We had our first interview or meeting with Sylvia and team right around the new year of 2024. And that’s when they gave us the assignment of writing all these songs for the album. It was a mad dash of writing from the second we woke up to the second we went to sleep. A lot of the material stems back, pulling from the previous years before that from journals, diaries, COVID time, a mesh of everything that we’ve experienced in the past few years.
Frankie: And I mean, we were doing that while also fundraising for the album. We’re a completely independent band.
Sophia: And working full-time jobs!
Frankie: And working full-time jobs, haha yeah. We would get together two times a week or five times every two weeks to show one or two new ideas each and jive them through. Then the next time we would play them together and then the next time we would go with John [Merikoski], do a quick demo with him, play the songs twice as a full band and that’s that. We did that for close to 80 songs and then Sylvia gave a run-through of all the songs and said these are the 22 or 25 that we should narrow it down to. Narrowed out a few more, narrowed out a few more. Then when we finally went to her studio in Ashland, Oregon, we basically recorded the basic tracks for 17 of them and then we decided on 10 that we should go full force. If we get to any of the others, that’s icing on the cake. We spent three weeks and then we left with the mix completely done and then went on tour like a couple weeks later.
That’s a lot back to back. And what about the production. Can you talk about Sylvia Massy’s impact and what working with her did for the album?
Sophia: Working with somebody at her caliber and her years and level of experience was humbling for us and we learned so much from her and her process and we kind of let her take the reins as far as picking the songs, processing which they were recording, and really working with her rather than hiring somebody to just record, which in some situations that’s great, but we really wanted somebody that we could trust.
Frankie: It’s someone who’s worked with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Tom Petty, Johnny Cash, Prince, System of a Down, and Tool. Like you have all the experience with all these greats, you know? We are the students here too.
Sophia: Yeah, it felt like a mentorship in a way not like we were going to school, like it was something that we were working on together. And she really wanted to hear our opinions in every step of the way. And it wasn’t like her opinion trumped anything else. it was always a collective agreement and sort of a collection of ideas which is how we like to work together as a band anyway so it really complemented [us].
Frankie: What is unique of working with her is the imagination that she brings to the recording process. Plenty of engineers or producers can record your drums great, you know, they’ll mix it well and it will sound good. It will sound great. It won’t be that there’s anything wrong with how it sounds, but it’s the imagination to take certain things in greater directions or try this thing that you would not have thought of.
Sophia: It just added like a spark to everything. It’s really cool.
Awesome. I definitely think that’s something that we can pick up and there’s a structured order to the chaos in the album. Not that it’s chaotic, it just has so many different elements.
Sophia: I think that’s always been something that we like about the music because we all have
different styles of music that we listen to and gravitate towards but bringing it together and having it be chaotic but still a journey through the album is something that I like in albums.
Frankie: I think we all do, we’re definitely a band of dynamic contrast, in music and personalities and everything. It’s really awesome to have songs that get super soft and super quiet and somewhere it’s just like a fuzz orchestra,
Sophia: You know, just like a personality, like nobody’s ever the same every day
or all the time.
Frankie: If you are all the time, you’re not real.
Can you talk a little bit about how these different sounds and textures in the album mixed together. It’s just something that came from each of you, Sophie, Nickole, Frankie individually or do y ‘all each have a preference for different types of music or was it together?
Sophia: I prefer to put a genre where they’re able to do music, but I think because we’re also
interested in different kinds of music and like to listen to different things and experiment with different things, it’s worked in our favor at least in this aspect. I don’t know, I was classically trained, Nickole was as well, Frankie played too. So pulling that in as well without being too obvious with it wasn’t, I don’t think, fully intended, but always a part of music.
Did you find it difficult to kind of find like to have to or to label the band or the album as a certain sound? Did you kind of at one point just want to say it’s everything?
Sophia: Always like a slash, like psych slash blues slash rock. Certain songs could be called different things, you know, like. But it’s like anyone trying to box or put yourself in a label. It’s more multifaceted than that. It’s rock and roll, you know?
Right on. We see that same contrast lyrically. We start with “Shadowfax”, that’s very dark theme, and mixes slower and gloomier sounds with calm but faster and mellow sounds. Then we also go from a song like “G-String” to “Eve”. Can you talk a little about the lyrical clash? What was the process behind writing the actual lyrics and the actual ordering of the songs for that same reason?
Sophia: I’ll talk for Nickole and me both, but I’m sure she would have more to add to this, but I think we just write from how we’re feeling in very candid moments and we pull from like everything, like I’ll pull from journals, diaries, we’ll pull from just like experiences that we’ve had, like stories that we’ve had together, things like that. And as far as the lineup of the album, I think that was really important to all of us to get it in a form that flowed. Like any classic album that you would listen to, you want to start at the beginning and listen all the way through and feel like you’re sort of taken on a journey or an experience.
Frankie: And one where you could pick up different things or new things each time you listen.
Sophia: Yeah, and alluding back to the classical stuff just having the dynamics of the flow of everything and having it be the story and experience that has a start and an end, and I like that it’s sort of book ended by two very psychedelic sort of dark, moody songs, and the rest in between is the subject matter, I just really pulled from anywhere that we’re sort of using as an outlet, like any sort of art form you’re using is a way to describe life, understand things that are going on, process things, and just work from that. It’s cathartic in a lot of ways.
Frankie: As someone who does not sing anything in the band, at the end of the day, the most I ever could have contributed to lyrics is like when I present like an instrumental idea, I usually will give it a dumb pet title that has no seriousness on my end. But sometimes they will take that working title and then they will actually write a song around it. Like “G-String” was one of those situations. I was like, because the riff on the song in the beginning is played like centered on the G-strings, I’ll just call it “G-string”. And then, you know, the song is called “G-String”. Haha
That’s pretty funny. Has listening back to the album done that to you, have any of the songs changed meaning or the way that you listen to them or understand them?
Sophia: I alternate between which song is my favorite or the one that I’m relating to at the time but the whole listening process of it has still been really cool and really like exciting and it’s like, that’s us; it’s really cool.
Frankie: I think In addition to that , all these these songs started in our demos. It’s each of us on our instrument or one instrument. We have our one part and then in the studio we got all this chance to experiment around and use different guitars on different parts and add all these bells and whistles and stuff and some of those songs we actually had only played like two, three, four times before we recorded. And at one point, Sylvia told us was once you have the parts figured out, don’t practice them anymore, because I want it to sound very fresh and very live, which to some would be counterintuitive. But now that we have that final recorded version, now we go back for some of them to figure out how to play them live and it’s like okay now I’ve got it read. Simplify certain parts or like figure out what is the the core essence of this song.
For new listeners, what should they know about Daisychain?
We’re excited to get the album out and we will play in your town at some point. We will get to you, you know, and please and let us know if we, if you want us to, if you, if we haven’t gotten to come to your city or town, we’ll definitely try to get it on a tour sometime soon.
By Antonio Villaseñor-Baca