Taylor Swift has proven that it’s cool for an artist to rerecord their earlier albums. Gavin DeGraw just rerecorded his debut 2003 album, Chariot, but he wasn’t trying to make it sound like the original.
“I’ve been playing the songs for 20 years. I feel like my voice has matured and my playing has matured,” he tells ABC Audio of the project, called Chariot 20. “I’ve sliced and diced these songs a million different ways since I wrote them … and it was a great excuse, it being a 20th anniversary, to go, ‘You know what? Let’s go back and rerecord this stuff. It will be fun.'”
Chariot 20 is more organic, soulful and piano-based than the original, but Gavin says he didn’t have to change any lyrics, because to him they’re not cringey or embarrassing.
“I was so careful about the original Chariot record to try not to have any moments like that,” he notes. “And I was ultracautious in some ways just trying to make a record that would age well. And I think we got a pretty strong result.”
For Gavin, Chariot 20 proves that you can “bring new life” to old material — as long as the original songs are solid. “The songwriting element is king, to me at least,” he says.
So does Chariot 20 point the way toward Gavin’s next era? “I don’t know,” he says.
“I think it’s a good opportunity to pay homage to what helped me get my feet planted in the music biz and find an audience that cares about me,” he says. “And also to show them where my head’s at right now artistically.”
He laughs, “Whether I’ll stay [in] this direction … I couldn’t even tell you six months from now.”
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