What's up with all these actors becoming musicians?

Long before landing several high-profile acting gigs — including as The Office's Andy Bernard, a Cornell-loving paper salesman from a family of privileged blue bloods — Ed Helms was a kid who picked up a guitar and fell in love with bluegrass music.

That appreciation of Americana has been a constant for Helms, who's jammed for years outside of the limelight with a group of college friends under the moniker of The Lonesome Trio. And now, via the self-titled debut record they're releasing June 16, Helms & Co. are turning their side project into art for mass consumption, as well as preparing for a string of shows in support of the record.

Actor with a band on the side isn't a particularly new or improbable turn for a thespian, but it does seem to be enjoying something of a cultural moment. Helms is just one of several actors navigating the shift from the screen to the recording studio.

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Their reasons run from the exhilaration of trying something new to that tug on the sleeve from their creative muse.

Other such actors-turned-musicians include David Duchovny, a veteran of TV hits like The X-Files and Californication. In recent weeks he put out his first album, a 12-song set called Hell or Highwater comprised of tunes he wrote that sprang from his learning to play the guitar a few years ago.

Also on that list is Michael Shannon, best known for roles on HBO's Boardwalk Empire and in films like Man of Steel. He sings and plays guitar in the rock band Corporal, which he started after moving to Brooklyn and playing shows at local bars there.

Shannon, drummer Ray Rizzo, and guitarist Rob Beitzel have released one album so far as Corporal, a name Shannon says he thinks was originally his idea. He saw it as a rank above that of private, making it a sort of darkly humorous reminder that you've accomplished something, but "really not much of anything at all."

"I started Corporal," Shannon says, "when my acting career was on the skids. There was about a year when I wasn't really doing much of anything."

Separate from his work with Corporal, he also performs on his own. On June 6, he's set to perform the entirety of The Smiths' 1986 album The Queen is Dead, at a venue in Evanston, Illinois. For that show, a different, one-off set of musicians will back Shannon as he performs the third studio album from The Smiths, the one that will entail Shannon singing about "The boy with the thorn in his side" and "the light that never goes out."

"There's a special reason behind it that's kind of private — I'm doing it as a gift for somebody, that's what I'll say," Shannon says.

Finding the time to do any kind of gig can be a challenge, though. Corporal last played together in New Orleans in February, and while the band would like to put out another record, "we're all really busy people," he says.

That's partly why Helms and his fellow bluegrass aficionados took something like two decades before they buckled down and decided to commit some of their tunes to the permanence of professional recording.

The group's members — including Helms on guitar and banjo, Ian Riggs on bass, and Jacob Tilove on mandolin — have played together since meeting more than 20 years ago at Oberlin College in the early '90s. Their careers went on to take them all in different directions. Helms acts, while Riggs is himself a full-time musician and Tilove works as an architectural historian.

"The Lonesome Trio is some guys who were friends first, then friends who played music together, and then before we knew it we were a band," Helms says. "It was always a meaningful but not a professional pursuit. Really, over the last couple of years our music friends were kind of asking when is the world going to hear these tunes — that it's time to get them out there. And I think that external boost was all we needed."