Music has been a constant in Jeff Daniels’s career from his early days as an actor in New York City in the late 1970s. The first track that inspired him to pick up a guitar?
“That would be Arlo Guthrie’s ‘Alice’s Restaurant,’” he says. “As I look back, it was someone who was writing funny. Here comes Guthrie with an acoustic guitar and a 15-minute song about a restaurant, and I loved it — I just loved it. That was probably the trigger for getting an acoustic guitar.”
Soon after, he was inspired by Elton John’s energy on his 17-11-70 live album, which was originally a live radio broadcast later released to the public and remains a gem in John’s deep arsenal.
“I was taking piano lessons at the time and not enjoying them, and then I heard that,” recalls Daniels. “If I’m going to play piano, I want to play like that. But then I bought an acoustic guitar, became an actor, and moved to New York, so I didn’t stick with it. But that was an album that opened me up.”
When Daniels finally landed in New York City, a friend introduced him to a whole new world of possibilities. “We were pulling bootleg albums of [Bruce] Springsteen from 1978 in Los Angeles at the Roxy,” recalls Daniels. “It was like, ‘Who is this?’”
And as dynamic and massive as those bootlegs are — capturing a young, energetic Springsteen on much smaller stages than you’d ever see him on today — for Daniels, it was all about the root of American blues at the end of the day, starting with the legend Robert Johnson.
“Now I’m into the Delta blues, and that’s when I went in and never came out,” he says. “Once I discovered the Delta blues and Skip James and Son House and all those guys, it was like, ‘Oh my god!’”
Daniels never stopped chasing that blend of humor and music onstage.
“Now I’m picking up on Christine Lavin, Steve Goodman, Loudon Wainwright, you know? Those guys who said, ‘It’s ok! You can be funny! Be entertaining!’ That all led to me playing an acoustic guitar onstage for 90 minutes.”
This story originally appeared in the May 2026 issue of Hour Detroit magazine. To read more, pick up a copy of Hour Detroit at a local retail outlet. Click here to get our digital edition.
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