Posted on: Friday, November 1, 2002
TGIF
Indie rocker Carrabba sings from the heart
By Derek Paiva
Advertiser Entertainment Writer
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| Chris Carrabba will sing about the places that he fears the most. |
"I'm missing your bed, I never sleep. Avoiding the spots where we'd have to speak. ... Your hair, it's everywhere." — from "Screaming Infidelities," Dashboard Confessional
Heartbreak is hell. Always has been.
And every night, Dashboard Confessional singer-songwriter Chris Carrabba specializes in singing about being dumped. Both of his albums as Dashboard, "The Swiss Army Romance" and "The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most," document the painful details of the same failed romantic relationship.
So what makes Carrabba's ruminations on heartbreak more noteworthy than the mass-manufactured pabulum of, say, Enrique Iglesias, Mariah Carey or Celine Dion?
Well, for one thing, Carrabba paints wickedly honest aural pictures of the messy, brutal realities of heartbreak — gaping wounds of love's end not swabbed clean and bandaged up for the mainstream tastes of adult contemporary radio.
His are lyrics full of endless microscopic examinations of what went wrong. They ask why someone who once loved you back so intensely would suddenly make you feel like dirt. They identify with the feeling that no one on Earth understands or has ever hurt as much as you do in, like, history.
And there's one more pretty cool thing about the burgeoning alt-rock phenom that is Dashboard Confessional.
Fans of the band don't just attend its concerts to listen to Carrabba's deeply mined misery. They show up ready to sing every single lyric detailing his visceral heartbreak.
In fact, Dashboard's fans have taken to singing Carrabba's lyrics so often and so loudly, that their adoration more often than not threatens to drown out the maudlin, plaintive vox of Carrabba himself. The phenomenon has become the modus operandi at every Dashboard concert, and will probably be no different when the indie buzz band makes its first Honolulu concert appearance Tuesday at World Cafe.>"I'll never really know why," said Carrabba earlier this week from a Seattle tour stop, trying to explain Dashboard fans' intense identification with his lyrics. "But the only reason I can think of is because (the songs) are written really honestly. And they're very meaningful, at least, to me. If that translates, it's accidental."
Dashboard's first CD, 2000's "The Swiss Army Romance" was actually a Carrabba solo effort. He credited the work to Dashboard Confessional — the name comes from his life at the time also being centered in and around his car — knowing he would someday form a real band to claim it.
Drummer Mike Marsh is the only Dashboard member still with Carrabba from last year's breakthrough "Places" CD; the band also includes bassist Scott Schoenbeck and guitarist John Lefler. Still, Dashboard's slowly percolating buzz over the last year rises and sets on the slight, tattooed body, extremely photogenic visage and woefully introspective lyricism of the 27-year-old Carrabba.
Carrabba himself comes across as one's most idyll imagining of someone who has suddenly, unexpectedly made it big at something he never intended to. He is humble, sincere and soft-spoken, often mildly and humorously self-deprecating. So new and so unfamiliar is Carrabba to success, that at times it seems as if he is battling equally determined needs to be guarded, yet tell you everything you want to know.
"It was just what I was in at the time," said Carrabba, about the reason for all the emotional turmoil on "Swiss Army" and "Places." "And I'm also, like, sort of, I hate to say, a little bit doomed to ..."
Carrabba paused to search for words before changing his course.
"So much has been made of how brutally honest (the songs) are, but to me they're metaphoric. In some cases, I was just feeling very negative about a certain aspect of my life that was not a relationship, but ... didn't translate well to music to explain why I was feeling bad."
So Carrabba used those emotions to second others that revolved around feelings of romantic heartbreak that were more easily set to music. The albums were recorded fairly close together in 2000 and 2001, before "Places" and Dashboard concerts began getting major buzz from the media this year. Writing and then singing about the relationship "every night ... and months on end" for the last couple of years, said Carrabba, has been surprisingly cathartic.
"Yeah, because it's so ... journalistic," said Carrabba. "It's very much a diary, in a real sense. It's like I got it out and the initial cathartic process was over." He paused. "But then I was forced to relive it again and again." Carrabba laughed at the thought.
Carrabba may still not be completely over his now-famous/infamous ex-girlfriend, but he said he's definitely not the Chris Carrabba heard on the Dashboard CDs 24/7.
"It's so strange to think that anybody would be so singularly faceted," said Carrabba. "Anybody that knows me — or anyone that's even been to one of our shows — will see that there's so much levity in the shows. It's not, like, a 'desperate' evening with Dashboard Confessional. It's very much a fun, positive vibe, you know?
"Yes, I would be miserable if I didn't have an outlet. But I have one, so I'm not."
And with that outlet, inevitably, comes Dashboard's fiercely dedicated audience.
"I think the coolest thing about my fans is that they're not, like, your standard pop culture, go-with-the-flow kind of kids," said Carrabba, proudly. "They're, sort of, the people that generally dig deeper and are looking for something of substance as opposed to something that's force-fed to them. And I respect that."
