Jeff Daniels seems to be having a moment - and not just in one area of his multi-faceted career. Following a 2013 Emmy Award win for Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama, “The Newsroom,” Daniels has again been nominated for a 2014 Emmy for his portrayal of anchorman Will McAvoy, and the final season of the drama has wrapped and will air...
Jeff Daniels seems to be having a moment - and not just in one area of his multi-faceted career.
Following a 2013 Emmy Award win for Aaron Sorkin’s HBO drama, “The Newsroom,” Daniels has again been nominated for a 2014 Emmy for his portrayal of anchorman Will McAvoy, and the final season of the drama has wrapped and will air this fall.
Daniels also recently got to re-visit (with co-star Jim Carrey) the biggest, most commercially successful film of his career, “Dumb and Dumber” (1994), for the purposes of a much-anticipated sequel, called “Dumb and Dumber To,” which will be released Nov.14.
And finally, Daniels is now embarking on a 14-city, Midwest tour of live music shows, playing his original, often funny folk songs while backed (for the first time) by his son, Ben, and the Chelsea-based Ben Daniels Band.
The Ben Daniels Band - Tommy Reifel, George Merkel, Ben Daniels, Amanda Merte, and Wesley Fritzemeier with dog Sugar Pop - during a rehearsal in Chelsea Saturday, March 8. Ann Arbor News file photo
Daniels will play at The Ark in Ann Arbor on Sunday and Monday, August 17 and 18 (both shows are now sold out); and given Daniels’ buzz-worthy, standing ovation performance at the Ann Arbor Folk Festival earlier this year (as well as his well-received surprise appearance at Lyle Lovett's concert on August 9), anticipation is high.
“(Folk Fest) is a big deal,” said Daniels. “ … You want to do well. You’ve got Patti Griffin and these other greats on the bill, and you’re the actor with the guitar, so you want to be more than that.”
In 1976, two weeks before Daniels left Michigan for New York to pursue acting, he went to Herb David’s and bought a Guild D-40 guitar.
“I threw it in the back of my car and moved to New York,” said Daniels. “I knew a few chords, but Jonathan Hogan, an actor with Circle Rep – I started hanging out with him, and he started showing me this, showing me that.”
The company Daniels kept at this time of his life also inspired him to try his hand at songwriting early on.
“Because the day I walked into Circle Rep, I met Lanford Wilson, sitting there splayed out over a couple of seats, working on a second act he couldn’t fix,” said Daniels. “It was like spotting an alien. … Suddenly, right in front of you, there’s this living, breathing playwright. And there were half a dozen of them around. … So I was going to work every day around writers, and I thought, ‘Why don’t you write something?’”
PREVIEW
Jeff Daniels live, with the Ben Daniels Band
What: Chelsea's resident movie/TV star (of the upcoming "Dumb and Dumber To" and HBO's "The Newsroom") is also a seasoned singer/songwriter, and he's now on a Midwest concert tour, accompanied by his son's group, the Ben Daniels Band.
Where: The Ark, 316 S. Main St. in Ann Arbor.
When: Sunday, August 17 at 7:30 p.m., and Monday, August 18 at 8 p.m. (Both shows are sold out.)
How much: $45 (but again, both shows are now sold out). For more information, visit www.theark.org.
As is often the case, Daniels’ initial experiments with songwriting were, well, not quite ready for prime time.
“I wrote some godawful songs in the first 100 pages of this notebook,” Daniels said. “I look at them now and think, ‘Get over yourself.’ So they’re songs that will never see light of day. But that’s OK, because I had to write those to get to better ones.”
In 1978, while Daniels was performing in Circle Rep’s production of Wilson’s “Fifth of July,” the playwright heard Daniels strumming on his guitar and handed him a poem about a bus trip from Missouri to Chicago. Daniels set music to the poem and the song became “Roadsigns.”
“We brought Lanford back for ‘Book of Days,’ so he was here (in Chelsea, in 1998) for 2 months, and we took him to Cleary’s one night,” Daniels said. “There was a guy playing, and when he took a break, Lanford said, ‘Have these guys heard you do ‘Roadsigns’? I said ‘no,’ and he said, ‘You’re kidding. … Get up there.’ So he made me get up and play ‘Roadsigns,’ and after I was done, he told me, ‘You need to share this with everybody. Quit hiding it.’”
Not too long after that, Daniels started playing live music shows at the Purple Rose Theatre as a fundraiser, and his songwriting, musicianship and showmanship continued to evolve.
Of course, at the same time Daniels was honing his skills as a part-time music performer, his son, Ben, didn’t seem all that interested in a similar pursuit.
“But he came to me at age 19 and said, ‘I’m ready,’” Daniels said. “I looked up and said, ‘Ready for what?’ Because years before, I’d said, ‘Here’s a guitar. Let me know when you want to learn how to play it.’ But he’d been too busy, being in high school, thinking about hockey and girls and whatever. … So we started with the blues, and he hasn’t had a guitar out of his hands for 10 years.”
Daniels said that Ben also worked to gather strong musicians for his band, the Ben Daniels Band, and that the group has played gigs in the upper Midwest, Nashville and New York.
Previously, Daniels has performed his music alone on a stage – or with one or 2 collaborators – but as he made plans for his Midwest tour, he thought about how “some stuff I’ve written can’t be done that minimally, and would be better with a band. You know it when you write a song. Like, ‘This would be a band song, if I had one.’”
Daniels quickly realized he could have one, and as he and The Ben Daniels Band started to rehearse all together, he felt as though everything was coming together nicely.
“They aren’t going to be an opening band,” said Daniels. “They’re part of the show, from the first song on. They’ll be featured in the middle of the show. They’ll do a couple of their songs, then I’ll come back out. … 80 percent of the music will be brand new – stuff I’ve written, but new. It’s a lot of work. Like learning an entire Broadway show.”
But part of what initially appealed to Daniels about performing music was that there are “no directors, there are no editors. It’s all you. So you’ll either get all the blame or all the glory.”
Jenn McKee is an entertainment reporter for The Ann Arbor News. Reach her at jennmckee@mlive.com or 734-623-2546, and follow her on Twitter @jennmckee.