Drake Bell

Though acting from the age of five after appearing in his debut commercial, Jared Drake Bell of Newport Beach, California, first picked up the guitar only upon landing a role in the 2001 television film Chasing Destiny alongside the Who's Roger Daltrey, from whom he received his earliest instruction. While still concentrating on performance work throughout his teenage years, Bell kept composing and playing music privately; once Nickelodeon's The Amanda Show ended in 2002, the subsequent spinoff series The Drake and Josh Show, which premiered in 2004, finally gave him an opportunity to display his skills on camera by both penning the theme "Found a Way" and portraying the guitarist character Drake Parker. Drawing strong inspiration from the Beatles and the Beach Boys, he issued his first album, Telegraph, on an independent basis in 2005, then moved to Universal for the follow-up It's Only Time the next year. The concert recording Drake Bell in Concert surfaced in 2008, yet new studio output did not arrive until the 2011 stopgap EP A Reminder. Two years afterward he reentered the studio alongside childhood idol Brian Setzer, resulting in the April 2014 release of his third album, the rockabilly-inflected Ready Steady Go!.