“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.”

Once they started recording, their soulful voices gelled as easily as the satisfying alliteration of their names. Both Morris and Mumford are glad they could sing live in the same room, a key to capturing their vocal chemistry. “Us recording the way they did it in the ’70s, where you just sing at each other in the room [in] one take, is where you can get the best results,” Morris says, “because you’re not trying to overthink every perfect note. You’re just trying to find the chemistry of each take. And that’s why it felt so fresh each time.”

Adds Mumford, “There’s a lot of singers around at the moment who are amazing in the studio, but not used to projecting live. I basically shout a lot. I probably should be more of a studio singer, but I’m not. So thankfully we both blasted away, and the level of bleed on the microphones was acceptable, because we sing in a similar style. Although she’s technically much better than me, we made it work.” 

As for the show itself, which is based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling novel and debuts its finale next week, Mumford admits that he’s only seen the first two episodes. Instead, he’s been busy working and—like the rest of us—“catching up on The Last of Us.” He gushes, “Oh, my God, I’m completely obsessed with Bella Ramsey.” Still, he appreciates that Daisy Jones captures “some of the boredom of the hanging around backstage” that’s involved in making music.

“Sometimes they can get it wrong and make it seem a little too grandiose,” Morris says of depicting touring onscreen. “Or even the rise to success happens way too quick. It happens in one scene.”

Morris has her own ties to Fleetwood Mac, the biggest inspiration for Daisy Jones, having released a 2019 cover of “The Chain” with The Highwomen and sung on Sheryl Crow’s song “Prove You Wrong” with Stevie Nicks that same year. She says that while it was fun to recreate a period in which Fleetwood Mac was one of the first rock bands “to have two leading women in the band”—Nicks and the late Christine McVie—she knows the era had a dark side. “Drugs, ego, it’s all such a fucking creative killer,” she says. “It’s really bittersweet because you get such amazing music out of it, but in a pretty costly way. [The show] is doing a really hard-hitting job at making that feel real.”

Morris also relates to how “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)” means different things for the show’s characters throughout the series. “I wrote my song ‘The Bones’ shortly after I got engaged to my now husband [musician Ryan Hurd] from this perspective of promising him that, even on the hardest years, we’re going to be in the trenches together. So I wrote it about love, and it ended up going number one at the peak of the pandemic,” she says. “It ended up becoming this emotional battle cry for the world at the time during the pandemic.”

“You give birth to the song, but then millions of people hear it and they put their own perspectives into it and project their own emotions, and so it gets these many lives. I think that’s the coolest thing about songs, is that they can change in a year for someone, or they can change in decades. So I’m sure if you ask Stevie Nicks, ‘What does “The Chain” mean to you now?’ it’s probably very different.”

Mumford, who also composed music for the first two seasons of Ted Lasso, plans to work on TV series only sporadically. “I don’t think it’s my bag long-term,” he said. “I like writing songs, and I like playing gigs.” As for Morris, she has a stage show in the works. “I’m a huge Broadway fan,” she says. “I’m in the very, very baby stages right now working on a musical for Broadway.” And Morris and Mumford collectively look forward to performing their song live with each other one day. Until then, listen to their version of “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb)” only on Amazon Music.