Maren Morris and Marcus Mumford on Their Fiery ‘Daisy Jones & the Six’ Duet

“Well, fuck, I want to sing that.” 

Those were Marcus Mumford’s first words upon hearing Sam Claflin and Riley Keough’s version of “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” a track he wrote with executive music producer Blake Mills for Daisy Jones & the Six. “Why did Sam fucking Claflin get to sing it?” Mumford jokingly tells Vanity Fair. “I was kind of pissed at him too, because I knew he didn’t grow up as a singer, and he sang the hell out of that recording. I was like, Fuck you, man. I’ve done this for years, trying to get to sound good. You just swoop in with your chiseled jaw, and fucking smash it out of the park, first time. It feels unfair.”

Longtime friends and collaborators, Mumford and Mills penned the fiery back-and-forth between Keough’s Daisy Jones and Claflin’s Billy Dunne while working on his latest record at Los Angeles’ Sound City Studios. “This was honestly a fun distraction in the middle of what was quite an intense session, when we were writing those first songs together for Self-Titled. So it was a relief imagining writing from the point of view of characters,” Mumford says. “We wrote two different versions—one that Billy would sing originally, and then one with the edits that Daisy made when she came in.”

There’s no question which character the Mumford & Sons front man found it easier to write for. “I love tapping into denial—I’m a Billy guy,” Mumford says. “There’s a song on my record called ‘Prior Warning,’ which is a version of ‘Look at Us Now,’ lyrically, anyway. So there were some correlations in my story and Billy’s, Daisy coming in and being like, ‘You’re full of shit, dude.’ I’ve had people close to me in my life who have played that role.”

After hearing the show’s rendition, Mumford and Mills decided to record a more modernized version with a powerhouse female vocalist. Enter Maren Morris. “I love her solo music. I also really love The Highwomen, and she always seemed to me, from afar, the member that seemed to keep the train on the tracks. I don’t know why,” Mumford says. “Because Brandi [Carlile]’s this dynamo, and Amanda [Shires] seems like that too. I know Natalie [Hemby], and she’s just the sweetest, one of the best writers around in my view. It just felt to me Maren was kind of an anchor in that band. So I was stoked to meet her anyway, and just felt like she would be able to access the attitude that we needed on this song. Thank God she said yes, really.”

It was an easy decision for Morris, despite never having met Mumford. “Meeting and having to dive right into a song can be daunting,” she tells Vanity Fair. “But, honestly, he and Blake just have such a lived-in rapport. And being at Sound City, it was my first time being at that studio, but they’ve obviously laid down so much land in that place and made so many great records. It’s just such a positive place to record music.”

Mumford and Morris spoke over phone and via email about the best way to update the song for 2023. “The recording is brilliant for the time that [the show] was set in, but you don’t hear many six-minute-long guitar solos on the radio right now,” Mumford says. The pair managed to strip the track down to its essence, “this feeling of singing this really direct lyric in a very succinct way,” Mumford says, while retaining the song’s stadium-tour feel. As Morris says, “it has such a soaring chorus that it deserves a full band behind it.”