This may come as a surprise to some of you reading this but actor Jeff Daniels is an accomplished guitar player, singer and musical storyteller, having released six albums, his first a live recording in 2004 to benefit his theater company, the Purple Rose Theater. For the man who appeared in such memorable films as Terms Of Endearment, Speed, The Squid & The Whale, The Purple Rose Of Cairo, and recently on the HBO TV series The Newsroom, for which he won an Emmy Award, music has long been an integral part of his life. From his youth taking piano lessons, to discovering Elton John, to his days as a young actor trying to make it in New York, the music has always followed him, keeping him sane while waiting for the phone to ring.
Today, that music has grown and developed into a fine wine of emotions, personal stories, humor and satisfaction. He has many live performances under his belt, able to sit alone with just his acoustic guitar or alongside his son Ben, also a musician and engineer. He can make people laugh, he can make them cry, he can conjure up memories that belong to him but make them feel as if they were from someone else’s personal diary. He has that knack. His 2012 Grandfather’s Hat and 2009 Together Again, with old friend Jonathan Hogan, can stand alongside some of the best storytelling albums.
This year, Daniels has been named the Honorary Chairman for Ann Arbor, Michigan’s The Ark club’s 50th Anniversary celebration. A legendary venue for folk, roots and ethnic music, many of the greats have graced it’s stage, including Patti Smith, Townes Van Zandt, Lyle Lovett, The Band, Arlo Guthrie, John Hiatt, The Prime Movers (featuring Iggy Pop when he was simply James Osterberg) and Daniels himself. As one artist called it, it’s a “listening place,” where people actually listen to the words and music. So to Daniels, it’s more than an honor to be a part of the year-long celebrations and he will be playing his own concert there on June 14th. Glide had a chance to sit down and talk music with Daniels a few weeks ago.
What is your first real memory of music?
Hmm, let me think. Well, I’m sure there was some before this but my dad played piano. He played a little jazz, kind of poor man’s Nat King Cole, and he said, “You should learn how to play the piano.” So I took piano lessons and I remember being ok but not really liking it. Then I heard Elton John’s album 11-17-70 and this was like 1970, and that changed things. “Oh, music can be fun, oh wow, music can be entertaining.” You know I was young and I could kind of play sections of Elton John’s stuff. Then I picked up a guitar when I moved to New York when I was twenty-one because I wanted to keep music in my life and frankly bringing an acoustic guitar was a lot easier than a piano. So I kind of switched to that and never looked back. But it was always around. It was always something I was doing. I took choir in school and did musicals but it was just kind of one of the things I did.
What kind of music was going on in your household?
Nothing really. The parents would play these Nat King Cole records once in a while but you know I came up with Led Zeppelin and The Who and Elton and Grand Funk Railroad, the J Geils Band. Then I discovered Arlo Guthrie and the storytelling. You could see it on “Alice’s Restaurant” and then I saw Arlo in concert in the early seventies. I was still very young and I had no clue what I was thinking, but I got interested in it and stayed interested in it. Then I discovered Stevie Goodman and John Prine and Christine Lavin in the eighties and when I went to New York, there were other actors that had guitars and it was just a creative outlet. It was a whole other level of songwriting and playing that went beyond three chords and a whatever. So I just stayed interested in it and pursued it.
When you went to New York, did you gravitate to the music clubs or did you stay more with your theatre group?
No, I was an actor and I was supposed to be an actor and that’s why you’re here is to be an actor. So that was written on the inside of my forehead. But when I’d go home at night, to the one room apartment, you’re sitting there waiting for the phone to ring, sometimes for days and weeks at a time. And you go nuts, creatively you’ll go nuts. So the guitar and writing songs, bad songs but learning how to write, was what kept me creatively sane in between the phone calls of, you have a job and now you’re going to go do this commercial or that play, and then later on, this movie or that movie. So the guitar has always been my creative friend that said, you know, “Come here, come here, play me. You’ll be ok.”
When did you feel the pull to start writing your own songs?
It was in the seventies. I went to New York in 1976. I was twenty-one and day one, I went to the off-Broadway theatre company, Circle Repertory Company, and I walked in there and within the first ten minutes I met Lanford Wilson, who ended up being a Pulitzer Prize award winning playwright. I had done one of his plays in college and I couldn’t believe it, it’s like meeting one of your heroes. You know, in college, playwrights are dead. You’re doing Shakespeare, you’re doing this and that and you never meet them. But to see a living, breathing playwright, who by the way is sitting in there going, “How are you doing?” “Well, I’m trying to finish the second act.” And you’re just going, my God, writing lives and breathes. It was my first exposure to the fact that writing is a fluent thing, that it’s alive, that guys like Lanford Wilson don’t just sit down and in two hours pour out a great play. It’s months. And I wanted to find out what that process was that got him to the finished product – and the writing and the rewriting and the dead ends and all that stuff fascinated me. So later on when I got my theatre company I started writing plays. But initially the one place I could learn how to do that was with a guitar in my hands writing songs. As I also got better on the guitar, fingerpicking and learning Doc Watson riffs and all that stuff, was writing stuff.
Then I found Stevie Goodman and I found Arlo and Christine Lavin and I found out that it’s okay to write funny. If you have a funny song, it’s okay, write it. Then write a serious one next and all that. But don’t dismiss it just because it’s funny, which goes to movies too. I mean, you never see, rarely see, comedic performances win an Oscar. Drama only please; comedy is a second-class citizen. And it really isn’t. I mean, you go back to the Greeks. The last time I looked the Greeks were holding up two masks. So I try to do that in the songwriting and the movie career, to be honest.
In your music, I noticed there is nothing that really sounds frivolous. You have funny songs, you have songs that are tinted with humor, but overall there is a meaning and a connector to the people that are listening. Is that the way you have always written?
It’s a goal. I remember at Circle, Marshall Mason, who was the Artistic Director, said once, he goes, “There has to be a connection between the audience and what’s going on onstage. There has to be a connection from the moment the curtain goes up till it goes down. You have to grab them by the lapels or connect with them and not let go. Not disconnect.” And that’s what you’re trying to do. You’re writing, and every songwriter knows this, you’re writing something from you that is everyone and that’s the goal. You don’t always hit it and you’re always chasing it and you’re writing stuff that you don’t know where it’s going but you hope at the end of the road that it’s something that the people listening can relate to. Otherwise, they’re bored.
It’s got to be about them and even if you tell a story or you write a song that strictly came from something you did, that happened to you, like there is a song, “Now You Know You Can,” which is basically that Newsroom speech and it was the day of making that speech and when we shot it and all that stuff. And just bringing them into the story of it, of here’s what was going down, here was the pressure, here’s what was at stake. So they will go back to look at that speech and go, “My God, the guy was handed the ball at the end of the game and he hit the shot.” And you hope that people come up into situations like that and they can go, “Am I going to hit the shot or not?” I don’t know, it’s just that’s the goal at the end of the day, that it’s universal and that whatever it is that you’re writing about you, it’s got to end up being about them.
Do you start off with melodies or words when music is forming in your head?
The radar is always out. Sometimes they just come to you. Someone says something, Lanford taught me this, he goes, “You’re always listening. You’re in a bar, it’s 2:00am in the morning and some drunk guy next to you says something and you go, ‘that’s a play. That’s the song.’” And again, “Now You Know You Can” is something that the Script Supervisor said to me after the first take of that big huge Northwestern speech in Newsroom. She walked up to me and she said, “Now you know you can do it.” Turned and walked away. Then you do take two. And that’s the universal message out of that one. You jump off the cliff and you land on your feet and now you know you can do it.
And that’s the only way to do it
Yeah, and so you remember something like that and you go, I wonder if … yeah, it is, that could be a song. Yeah, it is. So sometimes they will come to you like that. You know I have like four chord progressions that are waiting and saying, “Let us know when you got some words.” And you sit with them and you play them and you play them and, you know, not happening yet. So you’re writing down everything. I’m actually writing a song right now called “Three Chords Of Nothing & Nothing To Say.” (laughs) I’m writing about not writing just to write.
I want to ask you about a couple of your songs, starting with a song you did with Jonathan Hogan called “Roadsigns.”
That song we recorded in my apartment in New York live and that was a song that Lanford gave me. Lanford wrote the words to that and it was in 1978, we were doing a play at Circle Rep Off-Broadway called Fifth Of July. Lanford wrote it and Hogan and I were both in it. It ran for six months. And we’re sitting down there Off-Broadway with our two guitars in-between two shows and we’re just sitting there playing and Lanford comes in and he goes, “You guys write songs?” And we go yeah and he goes, “Let me help.” (laughs) Cause they were bad. And he hands Hogan a set of lyrics and he hands me a set of lyrics and he goes, “Look, I don’t know if this is a song. Maybe they’re just poems, I don’t know. But here.” And I immediately went and started working on it, as did Hogan, and his was called “Like Stardust,” which is on that same CD, and “Roadsigns” was the one that Lanford gave me. It was about a bus trip he took from Missouri up to Chicago in, God, I don’t know, the early seventies, and that’s what it was.
You know Lanford passed away three or four years ago and he was in New Jersey and Hogan and I went to see him thinking that he was going to be lucid and there, and he wasn’t at all. And he was days away from dying, we came to find out. We walked in there with our guitars like we’re going to be Dylan and Arlo standing around Woody Guthrie’s bed and so we did it anyway. We stood there at his bedside and played him “Roadsigns” and “Like Stardust” and “City Of New Orleans,” a Stevie Goodman song. He loved that song. That’s what triggered him writing Hot l Baltimore, one of his better known plays. But we did that and we played “Roadsigns” for him and a few days later he was gone.
What about “Middle Of The Night” off your Grandfather’s Hat album?
Yeah, I was doing a movie and a friend of mine was in a long-term relationship and two-thirds way through the movie she found out he wasn’t actually divorced, he was still married. She loved him but she broke up with him and it killed her. I had written some song for the director of the movie, some funny song, something you could play at the end of the shoot and everybody could have a laugh, a lot of inside jokes in it. And she came over to me and she goes, “Write me a song.” She sings also, professionally, and I said okay and so in talking to her previous to that, she had said in the story of their relationship and all that, she goes, “I miss him most in the middle of the night.” And again, that’s one of those where you go okay, that would be the title. And then you go from there.
You’re going to be Honorary Chair for the Ark’s 50th anniversary celebration. What are you going to do? Do you have duties or just playing a show?
(laughs) Well, it’s mostly just to bring attention to it but I’ve been going there, at least, when I got back from New York in 1986, I would start to go there and that’s where I saw Pat Donohue, I saw Christine Lavin in the eighties, and Kelly Joe Phelps and Arlo and on and on and on. Then I’ve gotten to play there, which it’s one of the premier clubs in the country, and there are a lot of them, but that’s one of them. You want to play there and you want to play well there. So I was honored to be the Honorary Chairman. I get to participate in the Folk Festival next year, if I’m available, but I do a benefit concert for them on June 14th, which is just a way to kind of help them raise some money and kind of talk about the history. I’m starting to put the set list together and I may do some stuff that is specific to the Ark. You know, I could pull out songs like “Middle Of The Night” and talk about the songwriters who have come through there and here’s a story of this song and here’s a story of that song. But also do other songs. I remember Clive Gregson and Christine Collister, a singing couple from England, doing Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” just an acoustic guitar and two voices. And I was blown away by how Clive played it. I saw them at the Ark. And I’ve worked that up and that’s turned into, you know, white boy tries to channel Marvin Gaye kind of thing.
You’re going to be playing some shows in May as well, correct?
Yeah, I go out with my son’s band
When did he come to you and say, “Dad, I want to be a musician. Teach me how to play guitar.”
Well, ten years ago. He was nineteen. You know, I’ve been playing guitar around the house his whole life and he was never, you know, and I said to him, “Hey, if you ever want to learn …” and he goes, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” (laughs) He’d go to hockey practice and date his girlfriend. Then when he was nineteen, he walked in the room and he goes, “I’m ready.” I said, “Ready for what?” He goes, “Teach me the guitar.” “Okay. Let’s start with the blues. Three chords, here we go.” And he’s had a guitar in his hand ever since. He’s thirty now. And when he started to get the idea he wanted to chase this, I said, “Just write your own stuff. Figure out how to do that. Don’t just do covers. Write your own stuff. Write badly so that you can eventually write well. But write.” And he’s done that and we have discovered that, the kid’s a poet, he’s an artist, and that’s what he should be doing with his life and happily he is, whether it’s recording, he’s a sound engineer, we have our own recording studio here and he runs that. But he also fronts his band, he can play with me. I mean, that’s his life, his music and writing and I just couldn’t be more proud.
You’ve mentioned John Prine and Lyle Lovett and Keb Mo before. How do they influence you?
I think it’s their originality. There are some, particularly big name people, who are wildly successful and deserve to be so. But you can’t tell them apart. You can’t tell the songs apart. It really could be anybody. Any one of them could have done this song. This one just happened to do it and now it’s a huge hit and that’s that. But I really admired the people that didn’t, at least for me, didn’t sound like anybody else, didn’t write like anybody else, and that’s hard to do when there are a million songs being written every day and a hundred thousand of them being recorded. Everything has already been done, every song has already been written. But Lyle Lovett puts out an album and you go, “I’ve never heard anyone write like this before.” John Prine’s storytelling pulls you in. A good story well told is still a good story well told and it’s hard to do that. That’s why there is so many bad movies. They’re shitty storytellers. But you get to a Lyle Lovett or a Christine Lavin or a Steve Goodman, on and on and on, young kids now, Jason Isbell, Stevie Earle is still doing it, Sturgill Simpson is getting a lot of heat, the Milk Carton Kids. You know, all these guys are like, only they could write that way and I think that’s what separates them. And the trick is continuing to do that and guys like Lyle Lovett and John Prine, John Hiatt, have done it for decades and that’s really hard to do.
And they are still performing and they are still good.
A good song is a good song. That is why Sinatra’s stuff still works. That’s why Tony Bennett and on and on and on. It’s about the song, that cliché, but it’s true and I don’t care. You don’t have to be twenty-two years old to be in music today. You can be in your sixties. It’s okay. It’s a different audience and maybe the size of the theatre is different but it’s still once upon a time. The song starts and you’re telling a story or you’re describing a moment that starts out being about you but then ends up being about them.
Are you at a contentment stage with your music?
I am pounding my way through a Pat Donohue instructional DVD. I have calluses on my fingers, there are no nerve endings on my fingers anymore because of Pat Donohue. So I am constantly trying to improve. I’ve been fortunate to work with Stefan Grossman a little bit and he’s helped me so much. Keb’s helped me. I can always get better. I can sit down and watch Stefan or, oh my God, if you want to get your mind blown watch Tommy Emmanuel. Watch guys like that and you just go, well, Kelly Joe Phelps, I’ll never be that but let me get near that, let me chase that, and just the pursuit of it content but content in getting better too. I don’t want to just sit back and go, well, let me use the same chords and write different lyrics. I’m always trying to get better. Creatively, it’s a good way to go, I think.
When you got your signature guitar, did you feel like that was a big accomplishment?
It still blows my mind. I remember in New York I had an old beater of a guitar and a friend of mine had his Martin and he just played his Martin and the difference is like, suddenly you’re holding a Stradivarius, the sound of it, the depth of it, the low, the mid, the high. I didn’t have that on my little beater and the Martin guitar has always been a Shangri-La. Then I had the Shangri-La of guitars for me. I bought one at Mandolin Brothers in Staten Island in 1981. I bought a 1932 OM28 or something and played it for a long time but it’s really something not to go out on tour. Then I’d get a couple more and then you get a movie and now you’re getting another Martin and now you have a guitar acquisition syndrome problem. And then you get this one, this 1934 C-2, used to be an archetype with the f-holes from the thirties. They made about five hundred of them -didn’t like them, didn’t like the sound of them. I even found one in it’s original condition in New York and it was rated a D+ for collectors. It just was a bad Martin. But a friend of mine in Lansing got one, took the top piece off, the f-hole piece off, and put a 2003 spruce piece, you know, the round sound hole in it and kind of made it a hybrid. So I’ve got a 1934 guitar except for the top piece. So I played that out for ten years and then I let Martin know about it and they said bring it in and I showed it to them and they said, “We don’t have this. We should spec this and make it and see if it sells a few.” And it did. It sold, I don’t know, about sixty of them or so. It’s inactive now but that’s okay. It was cool. Dick Boak at Martin couldn’t have been nicer. Chris Martin was, they were just so welcoming and it just meant the world to have your own signature guitar.
Especially in today’s economy when people have to pick and choose what they spend their money on. And people have chosen to spend money on a guitar that you endorse and helped create. That’s a big deal.
Yeah, and it plays well. It’s a real good fingerpicking guitar that looks nice and is built right and it’s nice to be in the Martin rack. I’m just happy to have a place on the rack.
No desire to play electric guitar?
I’ve got one and I try. I don’t know, it’s just like, I’ve worked so hard on the acoustic thing and especially when I go out with my son’s band and you know we got the electric guitar covered. They do. We don’t need me (laughs). So it’s a nice kind of different tone to have the acoustic in the middle of all that. So I’ve kind of flirted with it for a little bit, but no, I plug in and send it to an amp, but no, it’s the acoustic thing.
Are we going to see another album by you anytime soon?
I’m working on stuff. I’m working on something. I have a feeling I’m going to be real busy this whole year with acting and the touring, a couple of tours, but my guess is I’ll be writing the next one and then I’ll probably start working on it after early 2016.
Live photos by Vikas Nambiar
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