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To get ready for his fall tour, kicking off Thursday night in Phoenix, Gavin DeGraw decided to chill and relax at his childhood home in upstate New York, riding motocross and "getting a little of the woods back" into him.
"I live in a bus and go from place to place and sometimes feel very detached from what's going on," admits twenty-eight-year-old DeGraw, who has been touring non-stop for the last two years in support of his platinum debut, Chariot, including stints opening for Avril Lavigne and co-headlining with Joss Stone. The album had a slow build: Nearly a year and a half after its mid-2003 release, Chariot finally spawned the Number One single "I Don't Want to Be." At this point, the piano pop rocker has certainly come a long way since first leaving upstate for New York City.
"I needed a job," he says, recalling his earliest days in the city. "I was scrounging drinks. I was the guy that would walk up to the bar and drink someone else's drink." One night out, DeGraw accepted a much-needed offer of employment -- walking dogs. "Every morning at six-thirty I would get up in my flannel pajamas and, because I didn't have any money for the subway, I would put on a pair of running shoes and jog up to the Upper West Side."
But the gig only lasted a couple of weeks. "I was mouthing off at the dog owners," he says. "This one woman went, 'I know this is going to sound crazy, and it's raining hard outside, but try not to get the dogs' paws wet.' And I said, 'You don't sound crazy -- you are fucking crazy!' As soon as I got those dogs out, I ran them through every puddle in Central Park. That got me fired." Within four years, of course, DeGraw began gaining attention through his true calling: music.
As he prepares for his fall tour, DeGraw is eager to road-test some of the sixty-odd new songs he's already penned for his sophomore album. There's "Sometimes You Need a Couple Drinks to Fall in Love," which he dubs "a drinking song about how people just meet each other at a bar, and neither is interested in the other one." "It seems like alcohol and darkness assist in attractiveness," he adds. Other songs include "We Belong Together" -- which DeGraw insists he wrote before Mariah Carey's recent hit of the same name -- and the pointed number "Medicate the Kids."
"It's about giving kids prescription drugs so they obey, because either a) the shit you are teaching them isn't that interesting; or b) you're not a very good parent who can be bothered with discipline," he explains. "You are making a kid take a pill every day even when he's not doing anything wrong! [The song's] based on the 1980's Nancy Reagan drug campaign 'Just Say No to Drugs': now, a generation later, [those parents] just put their kid on medication. It's perfectly ironic. I try to find the irony in things."
As for any new material addressing his earliest profession, DeGraw smiles and says, "No, that was purely for the prestige."
Gavin DeGraw tour:
10/20: Phoenix, Arizona State Fair
10/22: San Diego, House of Blues
10/23: Hollywood, Hollywood Bowl
10/27: Hartford, CT, Webster Theatre
10/29: Atlantic City, NJ, Borgata's Music Box
10/30: Richmond, VA, Virginia Comm University
11/1: Detroit, State Theatre
11/2: Chicago, Loyola University
11/4: Beverly, MA, Endicott College
11/5: Cleveland, Sam Cooke Tribute Concert
11/6: Trenton, NJ, College of New Jersey
11/26: Minneapolis, Target Center
11/27: Omaha, NE, Qwest Center with Dave Matthews Band
11/29: Madison, WI, Kohl Center with Dave Matthews Band
11/30: Champaign, IL, Assembly Hall with Dave Matthews Band