Episode 48: Jeff Daniels

“Sometimes I’m asked if I’ll ever write a book,” notes actor, playwright and singer-songwriter Jeff Daniels, “and I always answer that I already have. It’s in my songs.”

This is true. But now it’s also true that the stuff of Jeff Daniels’s life is on delightful display in the Audible Originals memoir “Alive and Well Enough”—a collection of stories, musings and songs that invites listeners into the heart and mindset of one of our most versatile performers, offered with grace and good cheer and midwestern soul. 

Daniels, the two-time Emmy Award-winning actor and star of such iconic films as “Terms of Endearment,” “The Purple Rose of Cairo,” “Dumb and Dumber,” “Pleasantville,” and “The Squid and the Whale,” recalls being inspired in this effort by the story-laced songs of Steve Goodman and Arlo Guthrie, and, more recently, by Bruce Springsteen’s “Springsteen on Broadway.”

Part podcast, part musical memoir, part bulletins from the frontlines of contemporary storytelling, “Alive and Well Enough” is a wildly entertaining mash-up of Jeff Daniels’s many gifts as a writer and performer, including scenes from some of the author’s original plays, many of which have been staged at The Purple Rose Theatre Company in his hometown of Chelsea, Mich. “[It’s] is the only place where I get to do everything I do,” he says of his new audio project, which he calls “an adventure of an accidental artist who one day looked up and realized he had a sense of humor, a passion for writing, and stories to tell.”

Join us for an insightful, engaging and surprisingly candid conversation on what it means to channel the work of some of our finest playwrights and screenwriters – like Lanford Wilson (“Fourth of July”), Scott Frank (“Godless”) and Aaron Sorkin (“The Newsroom” and the Broadway adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird”). 

“When you’re inside the writing, it rubs off,” he says. 

This is true as well. 

Note: This episode of As Told To: The Ghostwriting Podcast features narrative and song excerpts from Jeff Daniels’s audio memoir “Alive and Well Enough,” presented courtesy of Audible Originals.

Jeff Daniels photo credit: Sam Jones

More from Jeff Daniels: 

• Jeff Daniels & Jonathan Hogan, “Together Again”
• Website
• Facebook

Please support the sponsors who support our show.

• Daniel Paisner's Balloon Dog & Horizontal Hold
• Unforgiving: Lessons from the Fall by Lindsey Jacobellis
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Libro.fm (ASTOLDTO) | 2 audiobooks for the price of 1 when you start your membership
• Film Freaks Forever! podcast, hosted by Mark Jordan Legan and Phoef Sutton
• A Mighty Blaze podcast
• The Writer's Bone Podcast Network
• Misfits Market (WRITERSBONE) | $15 off your first order 
• Film Movement Plus (PODCAST) | 30% discount
• Wizard Pins (WRITERSBONE) | 20% discount