Key Points
Gavin DeGraw has never seen One Tree Hill, despite performing its theme song.
The singer says he doesn’t watch any TV.
DeGraw frequently attends OTH reunions and sings “I Don’t Want to Be” at fan conventions.
Gavin DeGraw doesn’t want to be anything other than the singer of the One Tree Hill theme song.
Well, perhaps he’d like to be other things — but an OTH watcher he is not.
The singer, whose tune “I Don’t Want to Be” serves as the beloved WB-turned-CW series‘ theme song, admitted to E! News that, despite being an integral part of the OTH universe, he has never seen the show.
“I love the show, but I’ve never seen the show,” DeGraw told the outlet at the Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction ceremony on Thursday in New York. “I love the people on the show, but I’ve never seen it. Is that bad of me?”
One Tree Hill starred James Lafferty and Chad Michael Murray as half-brothers, Nathan and Lucas Scott, respectively, who compete for positions on their high school basketball team while navigating friendships, romances, and parental woes. The series, costarring leading ladies Hilarie Burton Morgan (Peyton Sawyer), Bethany Joy Lenz (Haley James), and Sophia Bush (Brooke Davis), ran for nine seasons from 2003 to 2012.
DeGraw not only sang the theme, but appeared as himself in a few episodes of the show, which became a platform for musical acts due to its onscreen venue, TRIC (Fall Out Boy, Jack’s Mannequin, Jimmy Eat World, and Kid Cudi, among others, performed on the series.)
“I hear the show is amazing,” DeGraw said, noting he’s not an avid TV watcher. “It’s been great to me — and the fans have been amazing to me. Yeah, but I don’t watch TV. Isn’t that weird?”
As for how his song became the anthem of OTH, DeGraw told E! the opportunity came out of the blue.
“I was living in New York City, just playing bars and clubs. I had my little New York audience and I was just being an art nerd,” DeGraw recalled. “I made a record and the phone rang. And this guy was like, ‘Hey man, I want to use your song on this TV show,’ and I said, ‘Well, I don’t watch TV.’ And I still don’t watch TV.”
The record was his debut album, Chariot, which DeGraw rereleased in 2024 in celebration of its 20th anniversary. DeGraw continues to tour and regularly headlines major official One Tree Hill reunions and fan conventions.
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Although he’s not a member of the cast’s group chat, DeGraw has said he very much feels included in the OTH family.
“Every now and again someone will reach out and say, ‘Hey, man, you know, we’re gonna get together and there’s gonna be this or that and you know,’ and you go, ‘That’s very cool. Let’s do something,'” he told PEOPLE in 2024.
“Everybody’s really cool. We still all keep in touch here and there, which is nice,” he added. “The blood is good there.”
A revival of OTH had been in the works, but Bush shared earlier this year that the process has stalled, reportedly due to network acquisitions.
While referencing Paramount’s deal with Warner Bros. after outbidding Netflix for the studio, Bush added, “I would say that we’re all very aware of what’s happening to media right now and who media is being bought by and I don’t know that any of us are the current media conglomerates’ best friends or favorite people. But I’m okay with that.”
She concluded, “I’m patient, if nothing else. That’s the classiest way I can say it.”
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
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