Music Reviews // Gavin Degraw – Chariot

Everyone has that one music album that shaped the course of their life with its very lyrics written on their heart. For me it’s Gavin Degraw’s 2003 soulful, Chariot. The Chariot Stripped rerelease tour in 2004 was my very first secular concert– in a bar no less! My freshman college roommate and best friend since we met at our Appalachian high school Sophomore year was Mandy. We discovered Degraw’s album through radio play and listened to it endlessly in our dorm room on repeat in our little red, rounded boom box with its semi-ironic SpongeBob sticker. Any time we went somewhere in a car, we faithfully carried the CD around with us. When we found out the Chariot Stripped Tour would be stopping at The Otter in Kingsport, Tennessee just a few hours’ drive away from our university, we knew we had to go! I scrimped and saved for weeks to be able to afford what was actually a fairly cheap ticket, forgoing meals, and my weekly chai lattes in the student union.

Every moment of the show is imprinted on my brain forever. We arrived ridiculously early and had to wait a couple of hours in the back of a bar, a place where we were too young and strait-laced as students at a Christian school who had signed morality pledges to order drinks. I felt so grown up just waiting there. There was a mother with a tween who was determined to get the middle spot in front of the stage and tried to elbow her way in front of us. Eventually she leaned so hard on us that one of us stepped out of the way and she fell to the floor! She left us alone after that. The opener’s name is lost to the ravages of time, but I remember enjoying his music.  There were a few older football players from our very small high school who had made the journey to the show and pretended not to recognize us. I told myself it’s because we were cool college students now and they really didn’t know who we were in this different, adult setting of a hundred or so people. Then Gavin came out and I nearly blacked out in excitement. I can practically remember the entire set list.

Degraw commanded the stage with his presence and held the small audience crowded into the back room spellbound for the duration of the concert, playing all of the best songs from Chariot and a couple of covers. I blushed hard when he sang Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing. He alternated instruments between electric guitar and piano. We hung onto every soft-spoken word between songs. Despite the small crowd, he seemed to be enjoying the performance and that really shined through.

After the show, we hung around and were able to meet Gavin and have him sign our ticket stubs. I still have mine in an album. That was the first time I experienced being tongue tied in the presence of someone I really admired. He was genuine and kind about my stammering and I got to tell him how much his music meant to me. I still remember that I wore a chunky green cardigan with large buttons to the concert because it reminded me of the effortlessly cool Julia Roberts character in America’s Sweethearts which was one of the few DVDs we owned. I wore my curly hair in a messy clip the way she did in the film. I thought I looked smart with my glasses and definitely cool. Not quite Julia Roberts territory, but I felt good.

After the show on the way home Mandy and I discovered our huge mistake. We had accounted for the cost of our tickets and dinner, but not for the cost of gas for the trip. We were truly broke and ran out of gas on the way back to college. We sat in the pouring rain on the highway for hours in the dark listening to Chariot on repeat and analyzing every moment of the concert until the car battery died and we finally fell asleep. The next morning a kind soul, a stranger who happened to go to our college, took pity and gave us a ride to the gas station and paid for our gas. We missed our dorm curfew entirely and our morning classes, but it was totally worth it for our big adventure!

A few short years later that felt like a lifetime, I hosted my first dinner party and played Chariot for a dinner guest I was trying to impress while he helped me cook– and he was into it! We listened to it on repeat every evening while we were dating. At our wedding not so long after that Mandy gave me a cd with a video montage of photos of our time together from sophomore year in our tiny high school through to my wedding in 2006. To my bittersweet surprise it was set to Degraw’s More Than Anyone with lyrics like “you need a friend, I’ll be around, don’t let this end, before I see you again” It was the perfect wedding gift.

I still put the album on every so often when I am going for a long enough drive and sing along to every single word. The music is just as heartfelt and fresh as it was when I was 19. The album that defined one of the biggest years of my life.

Degraw is releasing Chariot 20 in September, you can listen to the single now on Apple Music. Mandy and I are already making plans, even though we live 900 miles apart, to meet up and attend a show together! As a culture writer for a local music label and a newspaper, I go to a lot of concerts in the Boston area these days and some of them tend to blend together.  I hope I never forget a moment of this one magical show from twenty years ago!