Preview
Dashboard Confessional
with Ben Lee, City and Colour, Say Anything and John Ralston
Friday, July 7
Jack Singer Concert Hall
(Epcor Centre)
Telling Chris Carraba that he’s been described as an "emo deity" causes the Dashboard Confessional front man to chuckle with embarrassment.
"I think it’s a misnomer. I don’t think it’s applicable, but it’s very nice," he says. "And sometimes it’s not so nice depending on whoever is making the statement."
Carraba adds that just like Pearl Jam outlasted grunge, he hopes Dashboard Confessional will survive beyond emo. "If our music is of merit, we’ll outlast that tag line and no one will call us that in years to come. If it’s not good, we’ll be a footnote – and that’s only up to us."
Seven years after the Boca Raton, Florida native shifted focus from his vocalist role in punk outfit Further Seems Forever, Carraba is riding a giant swell of praise for his latest effort, Dusk and Summer. A collection of 10 tracks that range from singalong melodic rallies to introspective love ballads to a contemplation of the personal experiences of American soldiers in Iraq, the album covers vast ground with seamless transitions.
Produced initially by legendary semi-retired knob-master Daniel Lanois, and then finished by Don Gilmore (Linkin Park, Good Charlotte), Carraba approached his first album in three years from a different angle.
"I used to sit down with a guitar and write the song and keep all the other elements or ideas in my mind. This time I thought, ‘I’ll record, I’ll play everything,’ and it really led me to new ground as a writer," Carraba explains.
"You wouldn’t think that this small guitar part over here or this drum pattern or this bass line, you wouldn’t think that would be the thing that you find the song in, but sometimes it is. I was taking the long way around – it was much more adventurous to me."
Once he turned the tapes over to his bandmates, he says, the parts would either work fabulously or have to be changed, but he’d already accomplished what he needed to.
A similar dissection process with Lanois steered Carraba in directions he hadn’t yet envisioned.
"It was like throwing everything into the cauldron with abandon and seeing what bubbles up. Either he took the form of the individual songs and helped me make them much prettier or he confused me in a really exciting way. (He) would pull out the most viral element of the song and say, ‘Now what do you think?’ Like if it was a guitar song, he’d take away the guitar part and be like, ‘Well, what do you do now?’ I’d be dumbfounded."
Carraba’s own path thus far has been unconventional and delightful. Dashboard Confessional has opened for Weezer and U2; the band’s "Vindicated" single was included on the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack; he’s been to Neil Young’s house for dinner; the band’s MTV Unplugged disc went platinum; and he’s experiencing a growing bond with his audiences, regardless of venue size.
"It’s surprising what you can take from a club show to an arena show or vice versa. If it’s good, it shouldn’t be defined by the room it’s played in. And I don’t mean by the music, I mean feeling. If that’s a good thing, it should work beyond the room," he says. "That’s the thing that we hold most dear, that connection. If we had gone into those rooms and found that connection wasn’t there, I don’t think we would have gone back to those rooms.
"But it was there and maybe tenfold and then you go back to the small rooms and now that seems magnified, too. That connection keeps getting stronger."
Carraba avoids questioning his ability to connect so intensely with fans at live shows. "I try not to think about it too much, I don’t want to ruin it. It’s this sort of mysterious thing and it’s in the mystery of it that it becomes magical."
The relationship concocted between listener and performer is also the root of some of Carraba’s most cherished memories, and those experiences stand out amidst a heap of personal and professional highlights.
"(They’re) the ones that really count, the ones that you remember years later – meeting a kid that tells you, ‘your music’s affected me this way,’ or a girl that says, ‘I was in a bad place and now I’m in a good place and it’s thanks to you somehow.’ Those are the ones that really mean something… sort of making it more important than whether or not people are using you in their praises or epithets in some genre war." |
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