Actor Jeff Daniels needs music to keep him sane

Go Knoxville
By: Wayne Bledsoe
May 15, 2015

Jeff Daniels knows pressure. Best known as an actor and much lesser known as a singer-songwriter, Daniels once shared the stage with songwriting legends Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt, Joe Ely and Guy Clark, and Clark handed him his guitar and said, “Go ahead.”

“The first order of business is not to urinate all over yourself!” says Daniels. “And it was just such a thrill. When Lyle says, ‘Why don’t you sit in?’ you have to! I remember I played ‘If William Shatner Can, I Can, Too,’ which had Hiatt biting his finger he was laughing so hard, which spoke to the whole thing: Actor boy picks up a guitar and plays with master songwriters. What does he do? ‘If William Shatner Can, I Can, Too.’ Then it was OK.”

Daniels is probably best known for his roles in the HBO show “The Newsroom” and the films “Dumb and Dumber” “Pleasantville,” “Arachnophobia,” “Terms of Endearment” and “The Purple Rose of Cairo.” But he’s been writing songs since the 1970s.

“That’s when I really started throwing things in notebooks,” he says.

Still, he rarely performed music in front of audiences.

“I tried it a couple of times and wasn’t comfortable and didn’t like it and the guitar playing wasn’t good enough, so I decided I was just going to be an actor. There were a couple of bar gigs, but that was it.”

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