O.A.R., Gavin DeGraw
ACL Live
Austin, TX
August 5, 2026
Photos and Review by Roy Vergara
The Three Decades Tour pulled into downtown Austin on a Wednesday and started early, with Lisa Loeb already singing at 6:30 pm while the theater was still filling in around her. The bill ahead stretched across thirty years of radio, the kind of lineup people bring their oldest friends to.
Loeb made her half hour feel like a visit with an old friend of the city, telling the crowd about landing her record deal at SXSW back when playing Austin meant outdoor stages and humid hair. She was off the stage by 7:02 pm, but not for good.
Gavin DeGraw followed at 7:25 pm and opened his set with “Leading Man.” He introduced his band, admitted that “Follow Through” was never very famous here, though it was in Japan, and sang it proudly anyway before making his way behind the keyboard for a cover of INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart.” From there a question about who had been to Woodstock turned into The Beatles’ “With a Little Help From My Friends,” which rolled straight into Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” without a breath between them, and by the time he handed the night off at 8:12 pm the theater was full.
O.A.R. walked out at 8:45 pm with more than two hours in front of them and didn’t rush any of it. Lisa Loeb returned a few songs in to sing “The Stranger,” and it was already clear that this wasn’t going to be the last pleasant surprise. The heart of the set belonged to the people who could not be there as Marc Roberge told the crowd about how they had lost some people along the way, then let “Miss You All the Time” finish the thought. “Let’s do someone else’s song,” he said next. The band eased into “Plush,” and right behind it came the oldest dedication of the night. “Mikey, this one is for you,” Roberge said, and the band played “About Mr. Brown,” a song they have carried since their earliest backyard shows, played this time in his honor.
The set kept opening up from there. “Hey Girl” arrived with nothing but its name for an introduction, and a homemade sign in the crowd talked the band back into “If Only She Knew,” a song Roberge admitted they had pulled from the set until he saw it asked for in handwriting. “War Song” carried a dedication of its own, a voice for the warrior and a hope to do it proud, and somewhere inside one of their own songs U2’s “With or Without You” and Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well” drifted in and back out again, thirty years of radio folded into one song.
Then the stage became a living room. Chairs and a table came out, the band bunched up around them, and “We’ll Pick Up Where We Left Off” got played the way songs get played at somebody’s house, small and close and easy, though it was never going to stay that way. “That Was a Crazy Game of Poker” broke the whole thing open, and as the band stretched the song out, decks of cards went up all over the theater, whole handfuls of them, spades and hearts catching the stage lights on the way down until the floor of ACL Live looked like the world’s biggest kitchen table, and the band just kept playing underneath it all.
Gavin DeGraw had one more entrance left, and he took it near the end, joining O.A.R. to sing The Band’s “The Weight” together before the night wound down at 10:52 pm, a little over four hours after Lisa Loeb said her first hello.
On a Wednesday built from thirty years of songs, ACL Live felt less like a theater and more like the biggest backyard in Austin. Three acts, one long guest list, and playing cards all over the floor. Lisa Loeb, Gavin DeGraw, and O.A.R. spent the night walking in and out of each other’s sets, a reminder that a band turning thirty can still sound like a group of friends playing at the drummer’s house.
Check out the gallery below to relive the night or see what you missed.
Gavin DeGraw
O.A.R.
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