Just by looking at Gavin DeGraw, you'd never know he was the victim of an Aug. 7 assault that left him with a broken nose, concussion and other injuries.
Yet when the "I Don't Want to Be" and "Chariot" singer visited TODAY's Matt Lauer for a quick chat and a short musical set to promote his new album, "Sweeter," the singer indicated that the scars he was left with largely internal: Mainly a lack of memory over the night in question.
DeGraw, 34, said that on the night he was attacked, he had met up with some friends and was walking home down a street in New York's East Village that he'd "walked down thousands of times." He recalled a group of people saying something to him ("the tone was weird") and then "the lights went out."
He was attacked by three individuals; after he came to, he recalled getting up to find a hospital, but his concussion made accomplishing that goal particularly challenging. "I was very bloody, which caused me to panic, which made it that much worse" he said. "I am told I got clipped by a taxi. My head was so rocked from the concussion that my balance was off and my vision was blurred. The 911 call was, 'Hey, I just saw this guy get hit by a taxi.' Whether I got clipped by it, or possibly went up to it to say 'can you help me?' (I don't know)."
Much of what DeGraw now knows was pieced together by post-attack witnesses. Lauer asked him if he worried about how a broken nose could change his singing voice, but DeGraw said he had other priorities at first: Seeing his family at his mother's 60th birthday the following week.
"We were all supposed to meet in Nashville for a show, and just seeing their faces after this was really the worst thing. But then after realizing how bad off I was by the looks on their faces, that's when I started concentrating on my voice and thinking I could have trouble."
No one has been arrested for the attack at this time.
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