Dashboard Confessional

written by Sophie Ferrandino

–

Some moments in life are planned out.  Way ahead of us can we see our future:  Where we’ll be, what we want, etc.  I will spare you the cheesy talk you avoided all your teenage years with your mom and, or dad.  But there are instants, just sparkles of a moment where you look around and tell yourself:  “Never in a thousand years would I have imagined THIS!”  That is exactly what went through my mind as I was escorted backstage at Bell Centre in Montreal to meet up with Chris Carrabba, lead singer of Florida based alternative rock band Dashboard Confessional.  Not only I got to walk where only few people get to walk, including our dear Montreal Canadiens, but also did I have Bon Jovi’s sound check as an amazing soundtrack to this unique moment of my life.  I couldn’t have scripted it better had I wanted to make that up!

Before opening for Bon Jovi in major arenas across Canada, Dashboard Confessional came a long way.  Chris Carrabba, originally from band Further Seems Forever, started Dashboard only as a solo side project back in 1999.  In 2000 he released ‘Swiss Army Romance’ which reached the thirty-ninth position on the Top Heatseekers US chart.  Then followed ‘The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most’ in 2001, ‘A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar’ in 2003 and ‘Dusk and Summer’ in 2006 which all received gold certifications.  2007’s ‘The Shade of Poison Trees’ and their latest ‘Alter The Ending’, respectively reached eighteenth and nineteenth positions on the US Bilboard Top 200.  They have been a full band since 2002 when Chris was later joined by three bandmates.  The band is now comprised of Chris Carrabba, John Lefler, Scott Schoenbeck and Mike Marsh.  So a decade later, they got a phone call which led them to open for legendary Bon Jovi during their 2010 Circle Tour and myself to get the opportunity to interview the founder of this amazing musical act.

I walked in the cozy room and was introduced quickly to Chris who welcomed me and shook my hand as if we hadn’t seen each other in a few years.  He then offered me a bottle of water I almost had to reach down for, giving he was much smaller than I imagined, but his smile made up for it!  We sat down comfortably on small black leather couches, failing miserably at keeping  Jon Bon Jovi’s voice in the background from distracting me.  As I had to make the best of my allowed time, I immediately fired up with a business question since I had just read the announcement about Universal Records dropping down their record prices to as low as $6.00 to $10.00.  Since Dashboard is part of Universal, I wondered if Chris felt affected in any way and to give me his thoughts on the matter.

“I think that’s cool.  People get their records for free anyways so…  Does it affect me?  Yeah I mean if the records actually sell it affects me, I get a cheque but, I don’t know, you can’t put the genie back in the bottle right.  But thankfully, I’m not in the record selling business, I’m in the record making business.  And until they can figure out how to download a t-shirt, I guess I can still make my rent!”  He finished laughing.  I thought that was a good one; touché Chris!

Focusing more on the latest album which was offered in two versions: one fully recorded and the acoustic one; it was said Chris preferred one of the songs better in the acoustic format.  Obviously I had to find out which one.  But he said he was not telling!  I pretended to be offended he wouldn’t tell me as we laughed, but he offered a fair enough explanation:  “Because then everybody will demand we only play it that way or their opinion will change you know, I don’t want to influence people like that, so I’ll keep it to myself.”  I then suggested he should have a contest for fans to find out which one it is which he thought wasn’t a bad idea at all, so who knows, keep your eyes open for that if you ever want to find out!

Remaining in the acoustic phase of the conversation, I simply asked if there was any other of his albums he would record all over again acoustically, besides the first two which already are.  He pondered a bit then said:  “I think the records are alright the way they are.  I think that if I were to…  And I wouldn’t want to do ‘Dusk and Summer’ again, but if I were to pick one of the other ones to do over, there’s only two to choose from that aren’t acoustic so…  ‘A Mark, A Mission…’ is so specific in my mind it has to be what it was.  So I would say ‘Dusk and Summer’ I’d be able to find the way in acoustically.  Because sometimes, it’s just as simple as that, it’s just not there.  As a matter of fact, when we did just a little acoustic three week run just John and I, I went through all the ‘A Mark, A Mission…’ songs with just my acoustic guitar, played them all looking for a different voice, different ways to present them.  Some were just , they just don’t have that mysterious thing that I connect with it just wasn’t there.  Some did that I wasn’t expecting to but, that record’s done the way it is.  ‘Dusk…’ I’d be happy to do over, actually I was happy to forget…” he went on laughing and then continued:  “The making of it was, is still, nagging at me.  Not the record itself, the record is fine, the songs are good but the process wasn’t my favorite one.”

With Jon’s voice still ringing in the back, I couldn’t help but move on and ask about his first reaction when he learned they were going to be the opening act for Bon Jovi.  He almost cut me off knowing where I was getting at: “Oh! It was absolutely instantaneous!  It was like I got the call and they told me, what would you say if you were asked to go on tour with Bon Jovi?  And I instantly said:  F**K YES!  I mean is there anything better?  Is there another answer?”  We both bursted out laughing as he went on:  “I mean it’s been tremendous!  They’re guys, they’re just guys!  They come around and they hang.  I mean who are we to them for them to come and yanking us in a corner and say: Hey come out, have a cup of coffee! – We’re like, really?  You know I’m not in wardrobe right? – That kind of thing.  But they’re just so awesome, I can’t believe that anybody could be that famous for that long and not be a weirdo, I just can’t believe it!  But now I know you can.”

Carrying on the excitement to their new effort ‘Alter The Ending’, I brought up that most critics claimed the album showed a lot maturity.  I wanted to know if Chris felt the same way about it.  He hesitated before answering:  “I feel like an adult and maybe I didn’t before you know.  So maybe that’s reflected in the music.  Because I don’t know that there was…  I’m not sure what they mean about maturity.  I think it’s a pretty big word, it’s pretty broad.  Now I’m assuming that they’re talking about lyrical content or maybe they’re talking about song structure, I don’t know what they mean.  They could talk about the whole deal.  But in any event we are getting different with different and I think it’s bound to happen, you learn more.  I never stop studying music; I never stop having life experiences about which to write.  So I guess that’s called maturing, try not to read as boring!” he finished, laughing softly.

Going towards a more classic direction in my questions, but since most fans I interrogated wanted to know; I went on and questioned the singer about where his lyrics came from, whether they were from real life experiences or not.  To which he answered without hesitation:

“My lyrics are personal to me and many of them are about my own personal experiences and are true.  Some are about my own personal experiences and are about how I would’ve liked them to be.  Others, there are fewer that are not about me.  They’re experiences that I’ve watched people that I’m close with go through and have affected me as an insider in their life and where I felt a total ownership of that experience in a personal way and those have made it into songs too.  You know, with other bands I’ve been in I was just able to write stories and that’s terrific too you know most of my friends that are songwriters write stories.  They all sound like they’re the narrator right?  But they’re all stories and there’s a tremendous freedom in that.  Sometimes I feel trapped in the fact that I didn’t give myself the option to just write stories.  But then again I didn’t think I was going to be doing this for ten years, I thought I was momentarily revealing and then I guess I just found something.”  I reminded him at this point that it made me think of when they toured with City and Colour a few years back and that singer Dallas Green’s story is also similar to his with Dashboard Confessional, to which Carrabba agreed and also pointed out how great Dallas also is.

My next inquiry was regarding their future touring plans after the big Bon Jovi adventure.  Was there any smaller headlining project coming up?  He started up joking that they would be doing something even bigger than Bon Jovi and I added some more to it, saying they would fill out football fields and huge stadiums and such to which he sarcastically agreed laughing some more.  But then became a little more serious answering:  “Yes!  We are in fact planning what we are doing next, actually this coming week.  You know we’ve been doing shows on the off dates from Bon Jovi.  We played a show last night at the Phoenix in Toronto, one of my favorites (venues) actually.  I like that size, there’s a special thing in those somewhere between a thousand and three thousand capacity rooms where, we just kind of decided we need to sweat.  We need to be physically uncomfortable in order to be really connected, so I’m kind of rooting for that as the room style for the next tour.”

Popular publications such as Rolling Stone Magazine are always good at putting labels on bands and this time I found out they had baptized Chris Carrabba and his band, the Godfather of Emo.  I thought that was a pretty bold and also very funny statement and was curious to get Chris’ feedback about that “tagging” of his band.  He first let out a big: “HA!” before responding:

“Ok, first of all Godfather sounds pretty cool, I like that.  I’ll choose to take it as flattering, but I don’t think it’s necessarily appropriate because of my opinion on who originated what or has become the emo scene you know.  When I was by myself at first doing Dashboard, they started calling Dashboard, Saves The Day, The Get Up Kids…  All these bands that didn’t really sound like each other, but they called us all emo, they needed a tag line.  It wasn’t wholly inappropriate because I felt like there was an emotional undercurrent to most of the song writing of all these bands, but the term itself applied in my opinion to like:  Texas Is A Reason, Sunny Day Real Estate…  Bands that had come like five, almost ten years some of them, before I even started playing in a band, so I didn’t think it was our term.  I thought it was appropriated for us.  And then certainly, as the next succession of bands and then the next and the third, fourth…  Emo became something that did actually start to sound a lot the same, a lot of bands sort of took shape and there was this specific sound.  And I still didn’t feel like I sounded really like that.  So, although I can clearly see the lineage, I don’t necessarily understand exactly how exactly I’m connected to it.  So I guess it’s flattering, but I feel it’s an over statement.  And you know the emo thing it wasn’t slings and arrows before, it wasn’t a knock at first.  So I could’ve embraced it.  It’s like when being a hipster used to be a great word and now suddenly it’s an insult.  So it was the same thing with emo, it was like alright this says something about this movement and now it makes fun of people and it’ll come around again you know.”

Being very impressed by that answer as it was by far the best portrait someone ever drew me of the emo movement in words, I ended my conversation with Chris with one last question:  “Six albums, Five EP’s, Ten years, how do you do that?  How do you come up with so much writing?”  He was very humble in his response:

“One song at a time I guess.  You don’t think about having that in ten years when you make one you know, you just keep making a little bit, little pieces.  It’s all just little pieces.  I’ll have periods of time where I write constantly and that’s not always good, it’s just always happening.  And then there’s periods of time where I don’t get to write for a long time and I say there’s a month coming up and I’m not going to leave my apartment.  There’s a moment of free time coming up where I’m not on the road and I’ll just stay at home and I’ll write a song every day.  And the song a day rule is always fun because, you write a lot of junk but you feel accomplished having written the junk and sometimes in the middle of the month you’ll get one or two jams and you’ll be like, alright, this is definitely more fun than like going to the movies…   As I have discovered it you can only stumble upon a good song writing a song a day, but those are the best.  All the songs that I have written in ten minutes have had the most lasting connection with people and the most fandom I guess you would say and my own appreciation for them has stayed the truest.   Then the songs that have a higher quality, like if I asked a musician to deconstruct the songs, the ones that I would say I spent three weeks arranging the song, they’ll say – Oh yeah! It’s a better song, quote unquote, but I wouldn’t listen to that over this that you wrote in ten minutes. – Because you’re channeling something in those ten minutes, you’re just working in those three weeks.”

As he ended with his very interesting theory on song-writing, I thanked Chris so much for allowing me to enter his musical world for just a little while and discovering a bit of what built Dashboard Confessional and made it grow into what it is today.  I wished him many more decades of great song writing and touring and I sure wish you will all catch him and his band mates live someday as their music truly channels a lot, as he put it in his last answer.  Anyone can find a piece of themselves in a good Dashboard song.

For more on Dashboard Confessional and their upcoming tour dates visit:

http://www.dashboardconfessional.com/splash/