Jeff Daniels’ alter ego: Versatile actor to show off his musical side at Northampton concert

Daily Hampshire Gazette
By STEVE PFARRER Staff Writer
January 8, 2015

Unless you’ve been living under a rock the last few months, it’s been hard to miss Jeff Daniels. The veteran actor has been all over the news and movie and TV screens, from his role as the not-so-bright Harry Dunne in “Dumb and Dumber To” to his turn as brusque TV anchor Will McAvoy in HBO’s “The Newsroom,” which just completed its third and final season.

But between the publicity tours he’s conducted and the screen time he’s banked, Daniels, 59, has been busy scheduling an extended musical interlude to support one of his cherished projects. An accomplished acoustic guitarist and songwriter, Daniels has hit the road this month for a new series of concerts to raise money for The Purple Rose Theatre Company, a nonprofit stage company he founded in 1991 in his hometown of Chelsea, Michigan.

And when Daniels comes to Northampton’s Iron Horse Music Hall Jan. 14 as part of that tour, he won’t be alone: He’ll share the stage with The Ben Daniels Band, a folk-rock quintet fronted by his oldest son, Ben, 30, a fellow guitarist and songwriter. Among the songs they’ll play are some of the tunes from dad’s latest album, “Days Like These,” the sixth of Daniels’ musical career, during which he’s mined the folk/blues idiom to write perhaps 400 songs.

“Well, some of those earlier ones will never see the light of day,” he joked during a phone call from his home last month. “But I kept at it and I got better at it.”

Daniels explains that his guitar playing and songwriting date from his earliest years as an actor. In summer 1976, after he’d graduated from college in Michigan, he headed to New York City to try to build his career. But before leaving, he bought a Guild D-40 acoustic and put it in the back of his car; he says he figured he’d spend a good amount of time in his apartment, waiting for callbacks, and that he’d put those hours to use learning to play the guitar.

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