New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) invites you to join Emmy award-winning actor, director, singer/songwriter Jeff Daniels for an intimate virtual concert experience full of original songs, personal stories from his stage and movie career that only he can tell—and plenty of smiles. Stick around for a 15-30 min audience Q&A following the performance. The questions submitted will be reviewed, with some then passed along to Jeff for reply.
Jeff Daniels is probably best known to audiences as a film, television and stage actor, from his Emmy-winning roles in Netflix’s Godless and the HBO series The Newsroom to the popular film series Dumb and Dumber. Most don’t realize that, besides his acting career, Daniels is a talented musician, lyricist, and storyteller, with nearly four hundred songs, three hundred live gigs and engagements, and five albums to his name. His songwriting continually draws favorable comparisons to Arlo Guthrie, John Prine and the late Steve Goodman.
In 1976, Jeff Daniels bought a Guild D-40 from Herb David’s Guitar Studio in Ann Arbor, Michigan, threw it in the back of his old Buick, and moved to New York City. That guitar led to a creative outlet, became a solace, a road into the artist that he didn’t know existed. Four decades and some 400 songs later, Daniels is still performing a collection of pointedly funny and pointedly poignant songs
Since 2000, Jeff has played such venues as The Birchmere, Club Passim, Cafe Lena, New York City’s 54 Below and Birdland, the City Winery in New York and Nashville, The Barns at Wolf Trap, Austin’s Cactus Cafe, Ram’s Head Tavern in Annapolis, Houston’s Mucky Duck’s, the Dakota Room in Minneapolis, The Ark in Ann Arbor, Chicago’s Old School of Folk Music, Seattle’s Third Door, Alaska’s Latitude 62 in Talkeetna, as well as numerous other opera houses and PACs throughout the country. With his son’s band, the Ben Daniels Band, he has toured both coasts.
He has shared the stage with Lyle Lovett, John Hiatt, Joe Ely, Cheryl Wheeler, Guy Clark, Christine Lavin, Keb Mo’ and Bruce Hornsby. He performed at David Bromberg’s 70th Birthday Bash at NYC’s Town Hall.
In 2012, the Martin Guitar Company began selling the OM Jeff Daniels Custom Artist Edition Guitar. He also narrated their award winning documentary, “The Ballad Of The Dreadnought.”
Daniels explains, “In 1976, I moved to New York City to become an actor. What I didn’t plan on was being so influenced by so many Off Broadway playwrights. In particular, Lanford Wilson, who would later go on to win a Pulitzer Prize for his play TALLEY’S FOLLY. Lanford taught me so much about the writing process, imagery, the love/hate relationship one has with such a solitary pursuit and the endless rewriting as you search for a better way to say it. In Hollywood, the joke is if you ask any actor what he really wants to do, he’ll say, ‘Direct.’ Not me. I wanted to write. So I did. With a guitar in my hands.”
