Jeff Daniels: From Broadway to the Blues – An Inside Look at His Artistic Journey

We have been playing this CD for quite a while.

It's a great CD.

It's called Live and Unplugged to benefit the Purple Rose Theater, featuring singer, songwriter and producer and playwright Mister Jeff Daniels.

And it's a true honor to have Jeff Daniels on the upper room.

Thanks, Jeff.

Good to be here, Joe.

So you're really busy.

I'm looking at your itinerary, doing as many shows this winter as a regular rock star performer.

What, what's been going on in preparation for this next stint of shows?

For the Purple Rose shows?

Yeah, the Purple Rose shows.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's, it's an unusual problem for me because I've got the cd out and people are going to want to hear certain songs off the cd.

So, you know, I've got like 35, 40 songs that I, that are not on the cd, that, you know, easily another 15 that I could play and could easily do a show of all new material, which I'll probably, over the ten shows, drop in all of those songs at various points and.

But it's fun.

It's, you know, I mean, John Hyatt, he's a guy that, I mean, he will walk out with a song list of 75 songs that he can play and depending on how he feels and what the crowd's like, and he'll just go down the list and kind of go, all right, I'll do that one.

So I don't know, maybe it'll be that this time.

So we have cameras rolling and tape rolling for possible further release.

We'll have tape rolling.

We've had tape rolling all four of the past years.

And we'll roll tape on every show.

We have about 25 to 30 songs that we've recorded live in various places.

Purple Rose last year and also Birdland and Joe's pub in New York and Ramshead down in Annapolis.

We recorded those shows.

So we've got, we've got plenty of material.

We'll probably do something.

Put out a second cd by the fall of next year.

Well, listeners right now, they can go to jeffdaniels.com for getting Jeff CD.

And it's all available on Internet websites as well.

ITunes CD, baby, in your local borders and other outlets.

And also you're up on itunes as well.

You've been doing a lot of traveling around and promoting the record, which, which is good.

You know, people see the album out and maybe say they didn't know you were performing the song, but you've been performing just about 30 years or so, right?

Yeah.

Quietly just been playing just for my own enjoyment.

Self taught, you know, got all the Stefan Grossman books and, you know, Kev, Moe and all those guys, you know, I just really, you know, studied it, especially Delta blues and all that.

I've just done it and written songs basically for my own kind of notebook, just to throw it in there.

It's kind of like a musical diary.

And about four or five years ago, in order to raise more money, the theater said, why don't you go out on stage with your guitar and see if we can charge money for people to come and see you?

And I was like, well, okay.

I mean, when you're raising money for a nonprofit, you'll do anything.

It worked, and they came.

And once I got through the first year and discovered just how naked you are out there with just an acoustic guitar and you're own material, I understood what it was and now have turned it into this show that's on the cd, which is very entertaining, very funny, and at times even moving.

That's interesting.

You say how naked it could be on stage.

I was reading a quote from Prince.

He did an acoustic set in his last tour, and he said, you can't be up there thinking about your grocery list the next day.

You got to be really focused on everything with the audience.

You've got to be there.

And, you know, what helped, to be honest was Broadway.

You know, as an actor, to be on stage eight times a week on Broadway or off Broadway, and where you're doing the show over and over and over and over, you start to learn where the jokes are, where, you know, where it's strong, where it's weak.

And it just, it was a great kind of introduction to, you know, the musical show, you know, with the acoustic guitar.

And it kind of, at least it wasn't completely foreign to me.

But you're definitely, you know, when you go into the guitar solo, there's no band to look to, that's for sure.

So our listeners right now, we're talking with Jeff Daniels and the CD, which is entitled Live and Unplugged to benefit the Purple Rose Theater.

All the proceeds going back into the theater, right?

Yeah.

All the proceeds from the CD go to the Purple Rose Theater Company, which is, we've sold through the website jeffdaniels.com and iTunes, et cetera.

We sold about 12,000 cds, which is pretty good for an independent release.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

People out in the midwest can go out to Chelsea, Michigan, December 20 through the 31st.

Ten shows.

Jeff will be performing at the Purple Rose Theater, 137 Park Street, Chelsea, Michigan.

And do you pronounce a tell ride?

Telluride, I believe Telluride.

Okay.

And then coming here in the east, which is about two and a half hours from where we are March 18 in Somerville, Mass.

At the Somerville theater.

Special guest with Cheryl Wheeler, which I'm.

Going to open for Cheryl, which will be a thrill.

I'm a big fan of her songwriting.

Now, we kicked off before we plugged in for the interview.

The opening track to the record, if William Shatner can, I can, too, and definitely showcases your humor, but great chops on the vocals and guitar playing.

This actually kind of.

Was it the impetus, the title for the record, to get you actually putting one together?

Well, you got.

No, that kind of came later.

It was in front of the first show I did.

I go, I gotta have an opening song because people are gonna come and basically, you know, wait to see a train wreck.

And I gotta deal with that, the disclaimer right up front.

And so I've.

In the four years, I've always opened my show with, you know, basically a song that says, look, I know I'm an actor, and I know I'm not known for this, and I know you're sitting back judging me with, like, an o and two, count on me.

But you know what?

It's.

Here's a song that deals with it, and it kind of gets that out of the way right off the bat.

So have you been keeping up with the.

The hot stove league with.

With the Tigers?

Tigers are a mess, and the Lions are worse.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

So I'm actually going to do the Tiger fan blues at the Purple Rose shows in a couple weeks, and I've rewritten it to include references to the Lions.

Right.

But I got to give you credit, because I heard you were, despite that really big losing season, you had the Tiger fan hat on regardless.

Right.

They're my guys.

They're my team.

You know, you got to stick with them.

And.

And it's tough, you know, to walk into, like, a place like New York and watch all these Yankees fans walking around.

I'm a met fan, so you don't have to worry.

I can't stand the Yankees.

Oh, well, hey.

Hello.

But I just, you know, I mean, I wear that.

I got.

We have an apartment in New York, the top, more of a brownstone.

And, yeah, I've got three Tiger caps in there that I wear around the city.

So why don't we give a listen to that song, which we just spoke about, the lifelong Tiger fan blues.

And it's from my special guest, Jeff Daniels.

You can go to jeffdaniels.com to find out all about the record and to support independent musical theater and theater.

So we'll come back and speak once again.

And that's another track from Jeff Daniels, live and unplugged at the Purple Rose Theater, the lifelong Tiger fan blues.

And Jeff Daniels is our special guest here, accomplished actor, producer, playwright and singer and producer.

So got to give you plaudits for all your storied career and, you know, film and Broadway and you've got just, you know, we'll touch a little bit on the, on the acting upcoming.

You have rv with Robin Williams, right?

That must, is it totally completed?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, they're in post production, so they're doing music and looping.

But yeah, we're done shooting.

And it's a very funny movie, big studio comedy about recreational vehicles and Robin and his family.

Basically, the movie is Robin and his family take a recreational vehicle trip and everything that can possibly go wrong does.

And it's, it's very funny.

It was a thrill to work with him.

Now, about how often do you films a year or does it vary?

It varies.

You kNow, it depends.

You know, if you're in demand or people want you, then you're, I mean, I'll probably spend six to seven, eight months a year shooting and then make sure I take the four months off it, you kNow, spread out.

But, you kNow, I tend not to take movies that, you know, shoot for a year and a Half in Thailand or something.

I think I saw, we were watching the other night on one of the channels, your old buddy Woody Allen, they asked him if something about, you know, how much he is into making movies.

And he said, well, if it's 630 at night and they want to do another shot over and over and the nick game's at seven, he goes, inevitably he'll go to the nick game instead of doing the other shot.

It's true.

And it's a great lesson.

I mean, when we shot purple rose of Cairo, I was on that for Woody.

That was definitely it.

If he had Knicks tickets or the game was on tv that night, we were finished by five, no problem.

Yeah.

Actually, he was commenting on the purple rise of Cairo and yourself during that.

So it probably was right around there.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And it was great because it's like, you know, it's like a human work a day, you know, it's not one of these 18 to 20 hours days where they just drive you into the ground.

It's.

Woody's got Nick's tickets and he's going, and that's a wrap.

It's beautiful.

It's a beautiful thing.

Well, you know, the thing about what you've done, I'm sure, for your family and your wife, you worked in New York and established a movie career, and then you went back home to Chelsea, Michigan.

What's it like?

What was actually.

What was it like at the beginning, making that decision to go back home and still make a career and do what you love.

Well, all we did, Kathleen and I just.

We wanted.

We had one kid, we were gonna have more.

And we both are from Michigan, so it was familiar to us.

It was home.

And after ten years in New York, we just moved back to Michigan because it was home.

And that's where we wanted to be, and that's where we wanted to be based.

And all we did, which is unusual in Hollywood, is all we did is we put family first, career second.

It was that simple.

Career was a close second, you know, as far as money and supporting a family and all that.

But it was second that meant that we didn't live where the career wanted me to live, which was LA.

We lived where the family would be best off, in our opinion.

And I was the one on the airplanes, and that's how we did it.

And our kids, I think, are better for it.

Now, for the musicians out there, what kind of guitar do you bring out on stage and use on the record?

I got.

It just.

It's a great sounding guitar.

And Gibson, it was actually made in Kalamazoo, Michigan.

And so being from Michigan, that was important to me.

I've got about ten of these different guitars I'm playing right now.

It was an arch top with the f holes.

And they didn't sound very good back then, and so they stopped making them very quickly.

There's a company in Lansing, Michigan, called elderly instruments, and the vintage guitar guys out there know where that is and know of it.

So I don't feel so badly about plugging in the hardware and the pickups and all that stuff into it.

You know, I don't feel like I'm destroying a piece of art, but the sound of it is great, and that's what I've been playing recently.

So they got some good music shops out your way?

They do.

They really do.

Elderly is probably the leader, you know, as far as, I mean, they've got everything and they're a nationally recognized kind of, you know, store.

I mean, they're, they got everything and they're great.

I mean, I take all my stuff up there to be fixed.

Now with the success of this independent release CD, the live, and a plug to benefit the Purple Rose Theater.

Any future plans?

Right now you got stuff in the Jeff Daniels musical vault to put out another one studio release.

Well, we've got Christine Lavin, who's a big supporter of the CD, asked me to write a song called about food.

She's putting out a CD in about six months to a year called one Meatball, which is basically people like me.

She's very kindly included me with Dave Van Ronk and Tom Paxton and other people writing songs.

But it has to be about food.

It's a typical Christine Lavin comedy kind of thing.

And so that's the kind of assignment is to write something about a food, about recipe.

And so I wrote this song called Tomato pudding, which is, you know, this family recipe we've got that we throw out every Thanksgiving.

And so I turned it into this kind of, you know, sexual kind of thing that, you know, Christine blushes when I play it, but so I'm gonna put that on her cd.

We've got a live version of it that I did at Joe's pub in New York.

But we also, we're going to do a studio version of it that we're almost finished with.

That should be great.

And Jeff Daniels, our special guest, I got to thank you for coming by.

WVUF in the upper room.

And our WVUF listeners, if you missed out on this in interview and just checked in, we'll be re airing it in its entirety for three days and four nights@upperroomwithjokelley.com.

so we should go out with a couple songs from the cDNA, make sure fans come out, support you on this tour.

And if you're in Chelsea, Michigan, ten shows from December 20 through December 31.

Jeffdaniels.com.

let's see.

We'll go out with a song which talks about your encounters on the movie set with Clint Eastwood, dirty Harry blues, which has got a lot of humor to it.

And of course, the song, I'm sure, means a lot to you.

Mama never left her oldest boy alone.

Yeah.

Very supportive mom.

Right?

Very much so.

And she said something to me that kept me in New York, and it's probably a big reason why I'm still an actor.

So thanks, Jeff.

I really, really appreciate it.

Thanks, Joe.

Good time.