Harmony Tividad is a musician from LA, whose latest record Lifetime is out now on KRO Records; Kelley Dugan and Mina Walker lead the New York-based band Daisy the Great. Harmony features on the new deluxe version of Daisy the Great’s 2025 album The Rubber Teeth Talk with Friends, which will be out tomorrow. To celebrate the release, the three got on Zoom to catch up about the band’s origins, musical theater, and more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Harmony Tividad: I want to know how you guys met, and what was your first impressions of each other?
Kelley Dugan: Oh, that's so cute.
Mina Walker: We met in school in at NYU. We were at the Atlantic Acting Studio within Tisch. We met the first year of college, but we weren't really close friends. We had friends of friends and we'd see each other at parties and stuff. Kelley wore really stylish dark clothes, and she had the same hair she has now, really long blonde hair. She had really clumpy mascara — but in a way that she wanted it to be.
Harmony: That's so diva.
Mina: Yeah, very diva. I knew that she sung because she kind of was always singing… I think I just thought she was cool and strange, and she wasn’t in my group so I was like, She probably doesn't want to be my friend. [Laughs.]
Harmony: [Laughs.] I’m obsessed.
Mina: She was in a group of tall girls and I was short. Tall girls with really long hair — that's what I remember.
Kelley: But you befriended the tall girls. Now we're all friends… I know that I knew about Mina before school started — which I know you hate, but I'm just gonna say that. There was a Facebook group for our school that certain people were talking in, and I felt very shy, and Mina was one of the people that was talking to the other people that were going to school. So my first impression was she is chatty, she's confident, she's not afraid. I wasn't necessarily shy, but I just felt a lot more intimidated by the social scene than the skill section of school.
Mina: I feel like Kelley’s hiding the fact that she thought I was probably annoying.
Kelley: No I didn't. I actually really didn't. I thought that you were just somebody who was not socially afraid in the way that I felt socially freaked out.
Harmony: Wait, what are your guys' signs, by the way?
Kelley: I’m a Leo.
Mina: I'm Scorpio.
Harmony: OK, love. I'm a Libra. Keep going.
Kelley: So, yeah, I thought she was confident and cool, and then our friend Jack was in my group — and Mina, you had been in a group with Jack already, or were you just friends?
Mina: We were in our first group together.
Kelley: Yeah, I knew Mina as Jack's friend, and I loved Jack. So I was like, This will be really sweet to know Mina one day, but we were never in a class together. Then eventually we made friends through friends and would see each other socially. And I knew that she was cuckoo and really creative; I knew you painted. We would do random little art stuff and music stuff. And then eventually we were in class together. Our most bonding moment was doing a scene together as two little old women that were eating soup, and we couldn't get through it, we were just laughing.
Mina: We were laughing so much. Because it was Pinter, right? He's famous for having long pauses in his plays. And I remember this was the first time we hung out alone — we were practicing for this scene, but we were both in other shows at the time, so we were really tired and like, “Let's not like work so hard on this.”
Harmony: And so you guys were being silly about it.
Mina: Yeah, we were underprepared and we were really taking advantage of the pauses because we didn't know the lines.
Kelley: It was so embarrassing. And our teacher was like, “This was good, but if you ever want a career, you cannot just be laughing.” And we were like, “We completely understand and we agree.”
Harmony: Wait, I'm obsessed with you guys being in acting school. I was a theater kid growing up. Where did you guys grow up?
Kelley: New York.
Mina: I grew up in New Orleans.
Harmony: My dad's from New Orleans. New Orleans is swaggy… But I'm obsessed with this narrative of you guys meeting in acting class. Was the soup scene kind of the turning point of you guys being like, “I fuck with you”?
Kelley: I think we knew before that.
Harmony: But then it was like, “OK, we should work on more stuff.”
Mina: Yeah. The beginning of the band basically started because we were writing a musical together. There was this period of time where we had a lot of free time and we didn't know what to do, so I was like, “Let's write a musical.” We met up every day at the lobby of the Marlton Hotel and we would order fries and a cookie, and we would start writing this musical. It was about this indie band who would busk in the park. And in this world there were these pop stars named the Masked Ladies — one night, the girls were busking in the rain in Washington Square Park, and the Masked Ladies got out of their tour bus and got in a fight in a lightning storm in front of them. Then [the Masked Ladies] got struck by lightning and turned to ash, and all that was left was their masks. So the Mina and Kelley characters put on the masks, and then their agent — who happened to be traveling with them — got out of the tour bus and was like, “Get back in the van, ladies!” So then they accidentally took on the lives of these pop stars.
Harmony: That's so good. I want to see this. What happened?
Kelley: It stopped because we wrote one very crazy long song that was many genres and very freaky, and then we were like, “OK, now we need the music that's the normal music.” Because the whole script is about the push and pull between the pop land and their indie soul. So we were like, “OK, let's talk about the indie music.” And then we were both like, “Well, I have this song that I just wrote…”
Harmony: So it pivoted you guys.
Kelley: From the very first day that we started doing that, we never worked on the musical again. [Laughs.] We [realized] we could just do a band, which would be better.
Harmony: What was it going to be called?
Kelley: It was Ghostbuskers.
Harmony: Y'all are freaky with it. I like it. Don't leave this on the cutting room floor.
Mina: [Laughs.] At this point, it's like a 10-year-old script.
Kelley: Open the vault.
Harmony: I feel like you guys have a very esoteric outlook. Even when I was listening to the lyrics of “Dream Song,” I was like, This is so outlandish and cool and creative. I feel like so much modern music is very creatively in a lane, but you guys have a very wide landscape of what you write about, which is so beautiful.
Mina: Thanks, Harmony.
Kelley: Wait, so tell me about you doing theater.
Harmony: I grew up just obsessed with musical theater. I loved Rent and Moulin Rouge. It’s such a interesting art form because it's really immersive and so multifaceted. I know they're largely considered corny as a craft, but I love them.
Kelley: I love musicals too.
Harmony: Do you go in New York?
Kelley: Yeah. I've been going less recently just because it's so expensive…
Harmony: It's so expensive. I went there a few years ago to shoot this Heaven Marc Jacobs thing and I was like, I have to go see Phantom of the Opera on Broadway right now. I bought a front row ticket by myself, which was all the money I was making from the thing, and I walked from Soho to Times Square in these heels. I'm sitting front row next to a man and — you know, the chandelier crashes down at the beginning — I literally jump into him. I was so underprepared for that… My dream is to write a musical. I just don't know how to start that process. It feels so daunting.
Mina: Get a buddy.
Harmony: Do you fuck with musicals, Mina?
Mina: Yeah. My mom is obsessed with musicals so that was the first music I ever listened to. Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, Guys and Dolls…
Harmony: Singin’ in the Rain is crazy.
Mina: It's such a good movie. And I grew up in the French Quarter and all of my neighbors were drag queens. This one neighbor across the street, Steve, I would go to his house and we would watch Wizard of Oz. I'm not super well versed in modern musicals, but I grew up on all those classics.
Harmony: That's so cute. So you guys started Daisy the Great while you were still at NYU?
Mina: We started right at the end.
Harmony: And did you immediately start playing shows together?
Kelley: We started off making an occasional video, like literally just a video of us singing. And then people started to ask us to sing at things — someone would ask us to sing at their party, or we sang as an opening to a Shakespeare event.
Mina: Yeah, we'd be in the middle of a house party with a keyboard and a ukulele and be trying to sing with no microphone. We were like, “This doesn't really feel right for the songs that we're writing.” We didn't really know too much about the indie scene in New York, but I did make a friend with somebody who was in the music tech program at NYU. [Years before,] I had shown him some songs I'd written, and he was like, “You should put drums and bass on this. I know a drummer and a bassist” — Nardo and Monty. They came and recorded on my song, and then I kept that song in a vault somewhere. But then years later, me and Kelley were like, “Let's make a Tiny Desk submission video and have drums and bass.” We had this other person — who was my ex-boyfriend, but he was the only person I knew who played guitar — and then Nardo and Marty, and our friend Sophie sang the third harmony part. We taught them the song in the room and we were like, “OK, now time to make a video!” We set up a little camera, we sung the song and we put it on YouTube. And then we were like, “Do you guys want to be a band?” And they were like, “Yeah.”
I think before that moment, we'd played one show at Gold Sounds where my friend, who's an actor who doesn't play the drums, played the drums, and it was really insane. But then after that, we started reaching out to venues and playing shows once or twice a month around New York. All of our friends would come because nobody knew anyone in a band. The rooms were very full, but it wasn't full of music people, which I think was an interesting beginning of doing indie music in New York. It was super fun. And the shows were obviously chaotic because we were trying to do four-part harmonies with monitors at Alphaville. [Laughs.] We were doing these kind of huge arrangements in these crazy-sounding rooms.
Harmony: What was inspiring you at that point sonically to make things that sounded that way?
Kelley: I started writing like that in high school because I did something called madrigals, which was like a more select chorus. It was 10 of us and we would work on really difficult arrangements. It was not a cappella; it was usually with piano, but very weird parts. I arranged “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap for the group. And then I also did “Paparazzi”—
Harmony: Do you have videos of this stuff?
Kelley: [Laughs.] I don’t.
Harmony: Choral arrangements of pop songs are lowkey my obsession. I have playlist.
Kelley: Really good. But so then I was just like, I love this and I love making everything crunchy and freaky. And then I started writing that way. But I had so many songs just sitting around for so long because I was not really thinking at all about production, and I had played out just by myself but I was like, I can't play these because there's no melody. I need to gather a group in order to play them.
Mina: I feel like for me, I didn't know how to play instruments very well, so I was just making songs on my computer with my voice and using it as an instrument. Which eventually we would replace some of it with guitars and stuff, but I would put so many parts because I'd want it to make it so fat. I mean, me and Kelley, we opened our computers when we were showing each other music and we had very similar GarageBand setups of just stacks and stacks of harmonies. But I also think we were inspired by a lot of music that was happening at the time — including Girlpool.
Harmony: Aw.
Mina: And Dirty Projectors and Tune-Yards.
Harmony: That's so sick. I'm obsessed with your voices together when you do the TikTok videos of you switching off. I'm always like, How the fuck are you guys doing that? It's genuinely insane. The “Tom's Diner” one is crazy.
Kelley: We just got back from tour and we were doing that one live. It’s so fun.
I want to ask you about your album. I love your album. I was watching your music videos today, and I wanted to ask you what the process was of putting the videos together for the record because the visuals are stunning.
Harmony: Oh, my god, thank you. Dude, it was insane — it was really funny and stressful because I just am on a tiny label, so I'm trying to make the most of whatever they have. And then I'm getting sponsors where I can, just getting anything I can together. Usually I'll go to a director with a concept and be like, “I want to do this and this is how much money we have to execute this,” and build on it with them. Like for the “I'm Still Learning How to Leave You” video, I was like, “I want to do smoke bombs and I want to go to Salvation Mountain and I want to be in a pickup truck.” So then Hannah [De Vries], the director, built an insane world around those little ideas.
But the “Best Dressed” video was crazy because I had been thinking, I don't know how the fuck I'm gonna make this video. I have this idea and I just don't know how to execute it, especially in this like indie realm. And my friend Caroline [Iaffaldano] hit me up and was like, “I think we should make a video for you like this,” and it was exactly what I had envisioned. And she knew how to execute it and to make it happen. So it was very spiritual. Everything felt like it kept aligning to benefit the work.
Kelley: That's so awesome.
Harmony: It's amazing when the world is naturally reinforcing your vision just through it being like, “Yeah, I'm gonna make this easy and happen for you.”
I have some esoteric questions.
Kelley: OK, I love it.
Harmony: What are the rubber teeth talking about? And what are they?
Mina: The rubber teeth are like your internal monologue, the voices talking to you.
Harmony: It's the voices. [Laughs.]
Mina: [Laughs.] I think the reason we wrote the line and that we liked it as the title of the album is because they're both real but also made of something false and manmade. The rubber teeth can represent things like doubt, but also ego and just the way that you think about yourself or the way that your brain can trick you into thinking about yourself.
Harmony: It's slippery.
Mina: Yeah, it's slippery. It's these things that you can spiral about that are not necessarily right or true.
Harmony: What are they to you, Kelley?
Kelley: I think the same thing, but I think of it as like you talking to yourself in your head. And throughout the record, I think they shift in their role or their goodness — because in certain sections of the record, I think there's a lot about doubt and comparison and ruminating about things that you don't need to focus on, but then in “Dream Song,” we say, “The rubber teeth talk and they cover the clock while you're dreaming.” Which is to say, you should keep dreaming. And in the dream, it's a space where you're totally free and brave and have a lot of trust and love for yourself. So I think there's something interesting about the duality of the inside self, you being someone that can be challenging or making things difficult, but it's also the same person inside of you that finds the way to be brave.
Harmony: I love that. I think creative bravery is something that we need more than ever. I feel like we're so encouraged to create things for this algorithmic world, and I think creating boldly and truly and unapologetically is a beautiful thing to be speaking on and promoting as a way of being.
Mina: Yeah, I agree. I've been feeling brought down by the algorithm.
Harmony: I know, I feel like I need to live life larger than the screen. I try to go out of my way to be like, How can I expand my experiences in real life to be the most enlivening, riveting thing I'm doing always?
Kelley: Well, we should all go to a musical.
Harmony: That would be my dream. You guys, congratulations on everything.
Kelley: Thank you! Thanks for talking to us, and for being part of our album.
