Interview: Jeff Daniels Brings His Song Stylings Back to 54 Below

Jeff Daniels is best known as an award-winning actor, with a career spanning everything from Broadway’s To Kill a Mockingbird and Blackbird to The Newsroom, The Squid and the Whale, and Dumb and Dumber. But alongside his work on stage and screen, he has quietly built a second life as a singer-songwriter, touring the country with a guitar and a catalog of sharp, story-driven country songs.

In this conversation, ahead of a mini-tour that culminates at 54 Below on April 7, Daniels reflects on how music became his creative outlet long before Hollywood took notice, the role playwright Lanford Wilson played in pushing him toward singing, and why he still loves the freedom of playing live.

With decades of songs behind him and no commercial ambitions beyond the stage, Daniels sees his music the same way he approaches his acting: with authenticity, humor, and a deep love for the craft.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

You’ve played and written songs as far back as your career goes, but I think people still don’t realize you have that side to you.
Yeah, and that’s ok. What it does is it lowers the expectations. I used to open with a song called “If William Shatner Can, I Can Too.”

That’s funny.
And it worked. It especially worked with the critics, who were just poised and ready, and then I beat them to it. But they’re always surprised. I did the Kelly Clarkson Show; I don’t know if you saw that.

Yeah, I did see that.
I’ll be doing that song, and I’ll tell the 10-minute story leading up to it. That’s a perfect example of, “This could be really bad.” When the expectations hit the floor, I start playing and I’m like Segovia.

When did you discover that music was the art that made you most satisfied?
I just did it as a creative outlet. I took piano as a kid, didn’t really take to it. And then I heard Arlo Guthrie’s “Alice’s Restaurant,” and later, guitar-wise, it was Steve Goodman and Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt. And then I just bought a guitar and threw it in the back of the car when I moved to New York in ’76. I knew three chords. What it became was my best friend, that guitar sitting in the corner of the room. You’re waiting for days, weeks, months for the phone to ring with a job as an actor, so it was a place to channel that creativity.

At what point did you start performing?
I tried a couple of times in bars in New York, but I was there to be an actor, so that’s all I did. I kept writing, and I was around writers all the time, like Lanford Wilson. It was just an outlet. I opened the Purple Rose Theater in Michigan in ’91, and about 10 years later, we brought Lanford out to write a play for us.

Jumping back to 1978, we were in the dressing room at Fifth of July, and I got a guitar and three chords, and I look up and Lanford’s in the corner of the doorway. He handed me a piece of paper, a poem called Roadsigns, about a bus trip he took from Missouri to Chicago. I don’t know when it happened; I have a feeling it was from years before. He heard me playing and how bad my lyrics were, and he went home, pulled this poem out, and said “Try this.” So, I put some guitar under it.

Now, Lanford’s sitting out here in Michigan, we’re in a bar and there’s a guy playing covers, and Lanford says “Go play ‘Roadsigns.'” And I go “Nobody knows I play. I play on my back porch.” And he goes “Get up there.” He was one of the few people that can say that, and I actually do it. Got up, played “Roadsigns,” and everybody was like “What?”

So that became, “well, why don’t we roll the celebrity out once a year between Christmas and New Year’s to sit on the Purple Rose stage, play songs, and raise money?”­

Then, as my career slowed down, I said “well, my backup plan is, if I’m going to fail as an actor, I might as well fail as a singer-songwriter, too.” I started playing clubs around the country, I got an agent, and I just hit it. I played everywhere: PACs, 200-seaters, you name it. I started to develop the one-man show that every actor has in their back pocket, except mine’s an acoustic guitar and a chair and stories.

Then Newsroom happened, the career came back again, but I enjoy it. I really enjoy it. I have complete creative control, which you don’t have as an actor. And it’s still really interesting to me. I have decades of songs, many of which will never see the light of day, but there are some that can still make Kelly Clarkson go “Holy shit.”

Do you have a method in arranging a set list?
There is a method that you learn. You’ve got to hook them with the first one; hang onto them and entertain them with the second; third one, they’re laughing; and now you can drop in the one that’s going to make them cry. Then you pull them out of that. You keep moving it around. It’s hard to go sad twice in a row for me. There are a couple of fancy guitar ones. The best compliment you can get at the end of a gig is, if it’s 90 minutes, they say it felt like half an hour.

It’s not unlike story structure and building to the climax. These songs are road tested, so I kind of know how they’re going to do before I do them; it’s just a matter of the order you put them in so that it builds to something, and then you can leave them wanting more, try the veal.

None of the stuff I write is intended to go anywhere. They’re not intended to be covered or sold in Nashville. This is the top of the mountain. If I play them well, they have achieved everything they could possibly achieve. 

What’s the song you’re most proud of?
“Roadsigns” is a beautiful song. It’s like Prine or Lyle. When Lanford hands you a poem, it’s definitive. Only Prine would write “Souvenirs” or “Hello in There.” You know it’s Prine, you know it’s Lyle Lovett, you know it’s Lanford Wilson. That’s kind of what you’re shooting for. It’s the same thing in acting. You want people to see you and go “I can’t imagine anybody else doing that.” That doesn’t happen all the time, but when it does, that’s the mountaintop.

Do you still have that original guitar you came to New York with?
Yeah, the Guild D40. It’s hanging in the recording studio here at home. It doesn’t get played. The neck is too skinny. Once I went down the Martin guitar trail, I became a Martin snob. That’s what I play with, a Martin custom artist edition that they made for me. That basically was, I can die now.