Gavin DeGraw Puts Attack Behind Him, Focuses on Being 'Real' -- Exclusive Q&A

While in many ways singer-songwriter Gavin DeGraw has enjoyed a charmed career, his success has not always come easily. The 34-year-old South Fallsburg, N.Y. native began his career playing sweet, soulful pop ballads in his small town in the Catskill Mountains, while working a variety of odd jobs, but was offered a major label deal after his first show in New York City. Ultimately accepting a more favorable offer from industry legend Clive Davis, who personally developed him from small-town hero to platinum-selling star, DeGraw's first hit 'I Don't Want to Be' went on to become the theme song for the popular TV series 'One Tree Hill.'

Three albums later, DeGraw recently embarked on a tour with Maroon 5 and Train in support of his Sept. 20 release, 'Sweeter,' appearing energized. His new single 'Not Over You,' which he wrote with OneRepublic's Ryan Tedder, received some of the most positive feedback of his career, and he was excited about collaborating with other songwriters for the first time. Then, in the early morning hours on August 8, after a rare off night from the tour, he was accosted while returning home from his bar, in New York City's Lower East Side. While his memory of the incident is still hazy, he was reportedly beaten unconscious by three men, then struck by a taxi while attempting to stumble almost a mile to the nearest hospital, where he was finally treated with a serious concussion and lacerations to his face. Though rendered almost unrecognizable from the attack, DeGraw recovered his spirits -- and his wry sense of humor -- immediately. With his face still healing from the stitches, he returned to the tour after missing only nine dates, and appeared as scheduled to give a live, in-studio performance of new and old favorites as part of AOL's Sessions, on Monday (August 29) in Los Angeles. Afterwards, we talked about his new album, his musical family, and his recovery from the brutal attack.

Since I have the unique experience of knowing a fair amount about the town you grew up in, I wanted to ask you a bit about your childhood in South Fallsburg, and how it influenced your career and your music.

It's funny that you had a life in the town I grew up in – because it is so rare to meet somebody who's been through there and spent time there. As you know, there's a lot of different religious groups that live up there, plus it's a prison town, where you have prison guards' kids going to school with inmates' kids, so there's so many different things happening within that small town. You end up going to school with people from cultures that a lot of people outside of that town have never brushed shoulders with. I think being exposed to so much different music within my family, and then being exposed to so many different types of people in my town, that really added to what I do musically, and the experiences I could draw from, the types of people I could draw from. I didn't realize it until much later on, of course, looking back and going "Wow, I've actually been exposed to so much more than so many people have been exposed to, from a younger age."

Watch Gavin DeGraw Perform 'In Love With a Girl' at Sessions

Your father was a prison guard, as you reference in your lyrics, but he was also a singer. How did that influence you?

My father was my first musical idol. He has a great voice, my father, a really natural Irish tenor. He had the same guitar my whole life, that same guitar that he used to play gigs with when he was a young man. It was this old Gibson Stereo, he'd go "Oh this song," and he'd start playing a song in the living room for me and my brother and my sister, just hanging out. He would go walk over to the piano and figure out songs -- he wasn't a piano player -- but he could figure out songs on the piano, and my mother was the same way. She'd play guitar, play the piano, singing and trying to write songs. She actually wrote some good songs, my dad also. He'd write grooves. He'd say, "Check this out, what do you think of this?" So that was kind of cool, having that in my house, because once the sun went down and you couldn't play sports anymore. You'd go in the house, and we didn't always have cable, so something to kill the time would be to sit around and learn music. It seems to be a small town thing, picking up an instrument and sticking with it. I notice a lot of guys who come from areas where there's not much to do once it gets dark outside, they turn to music. I guess now most people just play video games to kill the time, but we didn't have that rock star game when we were kids. We just had like, real guitars (laughs).

So they must have been supportive when you started playing ...

Oh, yeah, my family was really supportive. It's funny, I know a lot of really talented musicians, a lot of guys I met in New York City from playing in clubs and sitting in, playing a bunch of gigs with strangers. It's a very New York thing to just kind of show up at a club and be like, "Yo, you want to play tonight? Me, you, Thomas -- alright we got a band, let's play," and that was a real thing, culturally, that we got to do. I wouldn't have had that sort of community if it weren't for music. When I decided that I was going to pursue music, I was actually at a Billy Joel concert. I was like 15 years old, and prior to that I had other dreams. I thought maybe I wanted to be an ophthalmologist, but after a couple cups of coffee I'm not performing surgery on anybody. I get like this (shakes). So I left this concert and I said to my dad and my mom, "Hey I think I know what I want to do for a living." They said, "What's that?" I said, "What we just saw, that concert, that's what I'm going to do." And my father said, "That looks like fun, doesn't it?" I said, "Yeah!" And he said, "Well, that's what you'll do." I was just lucky that I had that kind of attitude towards it around me. They appreciate passion and the arts, so I was just lucky to have that in my life. I think there's probably a lot of people out there who would be sitting in my chair right now if they just had some people who were a little more supportive around them. I mean, of course there's a few people who make it no matter what. There's the George Lopez's of the world, guys who just want to go and persevere. They have such great drive, but I'm somebody who needed to have support around me for what I was doing.

And now you have the National Underground, a bar where you can support singer-songwriters and inspiring musicians, and give them a venue.

Exactly, man. When my brother and I opened the National Underground, which is our bar in New York City and the one that we're also going to open up in Nashville, we were kind of watching some of the art scene in New York leave Manhattan. Because Manhattan has always been expensive, but it became impossibly expensive. And so a lot of our artist friends were going, "Oh, man I got to get out of Manhattan, it's too expensive and we can't stay here. We're going to have to go out to Brooklyn, or Queens, or the Bronx," that kind of thing. We were like, "Man, this is sad!" Some of the venues that we love closed down; CBGB closed down, CB's Gallery closed down, the Bottom Line closed down. So many places that were really staple venues for New Yorkers and people in the art scene in New York City, they just shut down. That was really sad for us to watch, because those types of places were the reason that we moved to New York City. That was like the most important thing to us. So we opened our place to help just kind of preserve what New York has to offer, to add just one more spot down there where we can have our friends come and play and they can grace the stage. It kind of helped us keep that artistic attitude about New York City, having a bar and having a music venue like the National Underground there really helps preserve a little bit of that music scene that we love.

Watch Gavin DeGraw Perform 'Radiation' at Sessions

Totally. And I've had this experience myself, sometimes you've got this love-hate relationship with New York where you love the city and the city just doesn't love you for a second.

Every once in a while.

So the incident that happened to you recently [the attack], did that make you embittered at all, like "I'm trying to give back to the neighborhood and this community and I'm walking home from my spot ..."

Yeah, well it's funny, today is the three week anniversary of my beating -- my beat down, as it were -- it was a rumble in the Bronx but it was Manhattan. What happened to me, that was something that I guess some people could walk away from and could be like, "Forget New York, I do so much targeted toward adding to the New York scene and it didn't love me back," but I really don't have that attitude about it. My whole career started in New York City. Aside from just my music career, our music venue, that's a New York thing, that's where that started. New York brings something to your psyche that most cities don't, because there's so much variety there and variety means opportunity. It's like a dreamland for careers. When I look at that, I have to look at me having a bad moment a few weeks ago as just one little bump in the road, as far as this great, long journey that, other than that, has been just amazing. In New York, in some way, it's a weird way of thinking about it, but you take the bad with the good. It's not like you have to accept all bad things, but some of the things that are wrong with New York are also the things that allow certain things to suit you, too. So I'm already kind of over that moment. Not even a big deal. All my swelling went down and I told this other dude who interviewed me, I was like, "You know, I got lucky, the swelling went down, everything healed right and I look just like my mother again." Except for my body (laughs).

I guess that's a good thing. I've also heard you say that your new album, 'Sweeter,' is "the closest you've gotten to your true sound." I'm paraphrasing, but what does that mean exactly?

I think it's always a fine line -- staying true to yourself and staying true to your fans and also growing as an artist, and growing as a musician and wanting to reach out and go further. Personally, I think it's my job to experiment and then it's my fans' job to decide if they like what I'm experimenting with or not. I think that's so important for me. As far as what I think makes this record special for me, there's really a collection of minds on this album. It wasn't just me going, "This is my brainchild, everybody out of the way," that wasn't the case at all. I had a batch of songs that I felt really good about, but I wanted to expand, and there are a few people that I really respect as songwriters, so I wrote a couple of songs with Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic, who I think is a greatly talented person. A great guy, but also really has a good sense of melody and rhythm and lyric and production. So we got together there and we started writing. By the end of it we were grooving around the studio, just like "Man, this is really nice. This will be great for a single." We took it to the label and man, they flipped. That's the reaction you really need to have people have towards your material. The particular one became the first single which we just put out, ['Not Over You']. It's kind of riding that line between vulnerability and pride. You're saying "If I saw you, even though I'm missing you, I wouldn't tell you I was missing you." That may or may not be a masculine trait, but I do know it's prideful and vulnerable. I've been there, so that's why I got behind the song, and I know a lot of people have been there too, it's just real. You don't always have to be romantic -- sometimes it's important to just be real.

Gavin's 'Sweeter' hits shelves on Sept. 20.

Watch Gavin DeGraw Perform 'Sweeter' at Sessions