Jeff Daniels Sings The Blues With His Son Ben At The Birchmere

The Washington Post
January 8, 2015
by Rudi Greenberg

Jeff Daniels started playing guitar when he moved to New York in 1976 to pursue acting, but he didn’t perform publicly until 2000. It took Daniels three years of gigs — annual fundraisers for his Michigan theater company, The Purple Rose — before he felt comfortable singing his songs onstage. “You have to have a character to play,” Daniels says. “It’s still you, but don’t walk out there like you’re going to open your diary. Once I figured out the character, which was basically me in a good mood, the nerves went away.” Daniels, 59, recently released a new folk rock album, “Days Like These,” and is on tour with Ben Daniels Band, a group led by his son.

Why do you make music?

It keeps me sane: the writing, the songs, [or] writing a play. That whole kind of creating and writing is something that I have complete control over and can do whenever I want, and I apparently want to do it a lot.

You’re playing with your son Ben’s band on tour. What’s it like to share the stage with him?

First of all, they’re good and they don’t suck. This isn’t a vanity tour. They’re real musicians and they have their own Dave Matthews kind of folk rock thing going on. When we went out in August, it was a big test-case tour as to whether this was just a bad Viagra commercial where there’s the guy up front who’s the old guy, then there’s the 20-somethings behind him. But they don’t open for me. We come out and it’s all of us, and by the end of the show everyone’s been featured and it’s all original stuff.

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