Interview: Chris Carrabba Alters The Ending For Dashboard Confessional
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- In a lot of respects, distance makes the heart grow fonder.
For Dashboard Confessional - the vulnerable vehicle that brought Chris Carrabba's soul-bearing brand of emotional music to the masses - time away has recharged both fans and Carrabba himself.
The band returns to Philadelphia this Sunday as part of the Rockstar Energy Drink Taste Of Chaos tour featuring Taking Back Sunday, Saosin, The Early November, and The Starting Line.
"I guess there was a backlash, a pretty hard one" Carrabba explains of the scene and style of music of which Dashboard Confessional came to represent. "It seems to have waned. It stopped being cool to like this stuff, and then it stopped being uncool."
What started as one man's six-string crusade with heartfelt small club sing-a-longs, blossomed into a full band filling arenas and Dashboard becoming the standard-bearer for "emo" music. However, in 2009 after six albums, Carrabba turn the lights off on Dashboard Confessional to work on other projects - including the back-to-basics folk rock band Twin Forks. It's an experience Carrabba describes as "totally invigorating" over the phone from a tour stop in Portland.
But lately as Chris Carrabba has sat down to write music, once again it's Dashboard Confessional songs that come out.
"When the Dashboard songs started to come again - naturally instead of just trying to force out some new music - then I knew it was time for Dashboard to be a band again" Carrabba says. "We stopped Dashboard because we'd been three hundred days of the year touring from about when we started the band. There was just a point when I realized, hey we're tired and I think we're on the verge of phoning it in - and I don't think our audience stands for that or they don't deserve it."
"That's why we walked away when we walked away."
The band would reform for a festival show and a co-headlining tour last summer, and since then the Dashboard Confessional music has once again began to flow from Carrabba.
"There's such a well-spring of songs happening for me as a songwriter right now" explains Carrabba. "It's this glorious moment that I'm not really all that excited to race to the back end of. I'm really in the moment about this."
Fans got their first taste of Carrabba's new creative ambitions with the release of "May" last month, the first new Dashboard Confessional song since 2009. However, Chris isn't quite ready to unwrap the rest and release an album under that familiar name.
"I think the record will present itself to me as the right record at some point, and that's when we'll put it out" Carrabba concludes.
In the meantime you can hear the recently reformed Dashboard Confessional this Sunday at Festival Pier at Penn's Landing, as they headline the Rockstar Energy Drink Taste Of Chaos tour. Tickets are still available.
To hear much more from Chris Carrabba of Dashboard Confessional, check out the full interview below.
