Daisy The Great On Rubber Teeth Talk With Friends
- Josh Kitchen
- Aug 10
- 9 min read
By: Josh Kitchen / August 10, 2026
After ten years of burning down the road, Daisy the Great are at a point in their careers where they’re feeling the communal love of artistry. After last year’s great record, Rubber Teeth Talk, Daisy the Great, led by former classmates and now creative partners Kelley Dugan and Mina Walker, return with a new version of the record—but unlike a normal deluxe edition, it’s so much more than that.
Far from just a cash-grab release with a couple of bonus songs, The Rubber Teeth Talk With Friends is exactly that: new and reimagined versions of each song on the record, recorded by friends and collaborators the band couldn’t have imagined working with a decade ago. They were fans of Frankie Cosmos then; fast-forward to now, and Greta Kline is opening their new record with her own version of the album opener, “Dog.”
Featuring Harmony Tividad, Sleigh Bells’ Alexis Krauss, Babeheaven, Tex Patrello, and more, Rubber Teeth Talk With Friends is a brave and striking offering from a band that has spent 10 years becoming who they were always meant to be.
I spoke with Mina and Kelley all about how the new record came to be, how it feels to give your songs away, and what that means for them as their writers—and for their fans as their listeners.
I loved the record when it came out last year, but this new version—it’s so fun to hear all these different reinterpretations of the songs. Talk to me about how it came about.
Kelley:
We have had a dream for a long time to be able to do something like this, and we’ve explored it with a couple of previous releases. Like our song “Glitter”—we made a “Glitter 2” with our band, which is a more sleepy, emo version of “Glitter.” Then we did a “Time Machine 2” with illuminati hotties, and we did a version of our song “Tell Me Have You Been Dancing” with Claud.
So we’ve been flirting with the idea for a while, and it’s just something that we really enjoy: hearing songs live in a new context and exploring the way that changes the song, adds another dimension to the meaning, or uncovers something that sometimes we didn’t even really think about while we were writing. It helps you learn about the music and allows it space to grow.
Mina:
It is something that felt very exciting—to give it away to these artists that we are friends with, or idolized, or have dreamed of working with forever, and let them play with it and see what happens. So we had a dream to do it to the full record, and it was time. We did it. We’re super grateful for it.
I also just think it frees the song in a way. Even just for me, being able to listen to the music—I think sometimes when you make your own music and listen back to it, you can be very harsh on yourself. Listening to the songs in other people’s voices and production and interpretation just helps me appreciate the music in a new way.
You referred to these covers and reinterpretations as, “giving them away.” You are doing that, and it’ll always be yours, but to hear these songs interpreted by people you know, respect, and are fans of—that’s really special. When you hear these songs independently or think of them, do you think you’re going to think of the originals or some of these newer versions?
Kelley:
I feel like I will think of the original, but there’s something super special about all of the new versions where it also feels like it is the song to me. I feel like I hold them both in different ways. I think just because we’ve spent so much time with the originals on our side, it feels like those are our versions, and they are the song. But, for example, Lutalo’s version of “Mary’s at the Carnival”—that feels like another song. I appreciate that it is “Mary’s at the Carnival,” but I’m like, “This feels like a completely different song to me,” and it brings me to a different place.
I really appreciate the same lyric showing up and giving you a new feeling. It’s almost like the stories have a second part or something. It feels like the next part of that song.
Mina:
I feel like it’s both and neither. I think the song exists outside of all of the recordings, and I think that’s something we were trying to emphasize in creating this album—that the song can live through many different interpretations. You can come back to the original recording, you can go to future recordings, but it’s so common that songs evolve over time in different voices and different recordings, and it can hit differently for different people.
Kelley:
We also play them differently live. These songs will exist recorded in these ways, but someone could also find a video of the two of us playing the song with two guitars and nothing else. There are versions of the song that are kind of just in the air that also feel like the true song.
One of my favorite artists is Bruce Springsteen, and there are like three different versions of “Atlantic City” by him alone, and they’re all fantastic and unique. I love what you said about songs changing over time. That could be the sound, but also the meaning. When a song comes out, when you wrote it, it’s about this experience or this thought. But 10 years down the line, it could have a whole different life and meaning for you.
Mina:
I think that’s interesting too because, at this point, we have been a band for about 10 years. A lot of the songs we perform are songs we released 10 years ago, and they do mean something different. They still have the heart of the little girls that wrote them, but I think in order to perform a song 10 years later, you have to enter through a different door when you perform it.
I want each of you to give me—not necessarily your favorite new version, because I don’t want you to feel like you're being disrespectful to the other collaborations on the record—but what are some of the tracks that you were just so blown away by? I know “all of them” is the right answer.
Mina:
I think the one that really moves me is Tex Patrello’s “Sue Me Alice,” and I think it’s probably the most different from the original. It was the one that I was the most shocked by when she first sent over the demo of it. I just think it’s so delicate and magical and strange, and it encompasses a quiet intimacy that I think lyrically is a through line in the album, but maybe doesn’t show up sonically in the original album as much as it does in this one track.
It really changes the meaning of the song for me, or gives me more empathy toward the singer in the song. The pain of the lyrics feels very concentrated and tiny in a way that feels so sad to me, and also so dreamy. I just think that her brain is so cool. She knew exactly what she wanted to do. We were like, “We want you to sing on it,” and she was like, “Nope, I’m gonna produce it, and you’re gonna sing exactly what I want.”
Kelley:
One of my favorites is Harmony Tividad’s version of “Dream Song.” I think, similarly to what Mina was saying, it feels like this version of “Dream Song” reveals a softer, more personal expression of the emotion in the original song. The original version of “Dream Song” is really giant and goes through huge sonic changes throughout. It’s super imaginative production and really big—the scale of it is really big. It is a song that is about a dream, so it works in that way to have these big shifts. You feel like you’re on this weird adventure during the song.
But the real meaning of the song is having this adventurous, brave, loving, capable version of yourself that exists in that dream, and then wishing that when you’re awake, you’re able to access the same type of love for yourself and confidence in the world—to go through life with the ability to be bold in the face of things that might be scary.
Harmony’s version of that, especially with the harmonies—her name is Harmony, but with the harmonies that are built into the song—
Kelley:
We talked to her and were like, “What would you like to do? If you have any dreams—we have dreams for this song too—but what is your vision?” And her vision was a really Roches-y, very rich harmony sound. We were like, “That sounds exactly perfect,” because you could kind of feel the song wanting to be expressed in that way.
I just love the version of it that exists now. It feels so vulnerable, and it feels like a much more solemn expression of that feeling. It feels like something that is really close to your heart—a wish that feels really personal and settled.
In ways, I feel like the speaker is more capable of achieving it. I feel like they are really settled and steady-seeming in the way that they’re wishing for this ability. I really appreciate hearing the lyrics that way because it makes me feel like the meaning is just something so beautiful to wish for, and I like that it exists in this way to be heard.
When I think about Daisy the Great—and Mina, you talked about how you’ve been a band for about 10 years now—what makes you guys so special is your collaborative spirit and your ethos. So this record being this collaborative extension of your last great record is a very cool culmination of the past decade for you guys. It makes a lot of sense to me when I hear the record. It’s like, “Oh, they’re putting out this album again,” but it’s not really. It really is kind of your next record because of all the different ways these songs are changing and being explored by your peers.
Mina:
Yeah, totally. Totally.
And I bet you guys are like, “Damn, now we’ve got to follow this up with another record.” The next 10 years are starting.
Mina:
That’ll be really good.
And then you’re just going to put out a cover version every time, right? That’s going to be the new thing you do.
Mina:
The next one is gonna be us covering the covers. We actually were thinking about doing another version because we’ve been performing it a lot as a duo. We were like, “What if we just put out another one that’s just the two of us?”
That’d be a very good bit.
Mina:
The Rubber Teeth Talk Alone.
Then it’s like telephone. The album just slowly changes over time.
Mina:
We might do it.
What would you tell yourselves when you were starting out and “Record Player" blew up? Can you imagine being here, with all these legends that you probably loved back then, and now you’re here? It’s got to feel strange.
Kelley:
It's really crazy. Around that time, when we first started writing together, I was so obsessed with Frankie Cosmos. I know that record so well. Greta played, right around the time that we were making this version of “Dog” with Greta, a 10th anniversary show of her record. We were actually out of town for the main show, but they sold that out, so they did an additional show ahead of schedule.
We went to that show, and it was at Union Pool, which was where our first sold-out show was, like, a million years ago. Greta was playing this record, and I was like, “It’s so crazy because I know every word of this record.”
In the past, I would have just died to be at this show. I would have just been happy to be at the show. And now to know Greta and have her work on this song, and feel like we’ve arrived at this place—we’ve known each other on the internet for a while, but when we met in person, we were like, “Oh, it’s so easy to be friends with you. You seem lovely.”
We were just like, “Oh, this is perfect. Of course we could be great friends,” because we’ve loved her music for so long.
It was nice to feel like there wasn’t any barrier anymore. I think the 10 years that have passed have allowed us to grow into ourselves in a way where we feel really confident and able to be there. We’re grateful to be able to work with the people that we have idolized and loved for so long.
I think even people who maybe haven’t heard the original version will love this.
Mina:
Yeah, we wanted it to be something that could stand on its own. I think the idea of a deluxe record where it’s all the same songs and one new song—I was like, “I don’t really want to do that.” I feel excited about it being something that is completely different. And I think it does stand alone as its own thing.
Comments