Last month, I interviewed Gavin DeGraw. A long time coming, his was the first concert I reviewed back in college and part of me has always wanted to meet him and tell him this. Nearly 10 years ago, I still remember the moment so vividly. Notebook in one hand and camera in the other, I was able to get to the front row of the show at Rutgers and a thought flashed through my head, “I could do this for a living!”
Of course I had already seen the film Almost Famous, but for some reason it never occurred to me that being a music journalist could actually be a real job. That Gavin DeGraw show changed everything. I began writing for our entertainment section of the school newspaper, interned at MTV, Rolling Stone and JANE Magazine in hopes to somehow make a career out of it. Somehow, much blood, sweat and tears later, I made it happen.
When I sat down with DeGraw, we talked about the struggle of starting out in music can be, the state of today’s music, his new album Make A Move, and the story behind his smash hit, “I Don’t Want To Be.”
“When I wrote ‘I Don’t Want To Be’ I was hearing so many of the songs that were coming out at the time and so many of the new artists that were coming out in different genres. Essentially they would say, ‘My name is… I’m from some place, all my homies or all my people or all my friends are like such and such and I represent this.’ I thought, ‘It seems like such a simple way to approach it, but realistically it’s so smart to just write a song that is essentially stating your identity.’”
Watch the video below, and for more of my interview with Gavin visit Radio.com.