![]() ![]() ![]() Meaningful expression of those emotions is another, and Dashboard Confessional’s late-career music is less powerful than its early work, precisely because it comes from a place of remove. “There’s still a kid somewhere that needs to hear this, who’s tired of bleeding and battered and being torn up,” Carrabba announces, on “We Fight.”Ĭommitment to honoring emotional distress is one thing. Yet, even from this vantage, he remains true to the tenets of emo-that life is essentially terrible, and that every experience is rooted in a kind of emotionally stunted suffering and adversity that must be tackled. “Ooh, we’re gonna be all right!” he tells his listeners, a stark turn from the man who, on the early hit “Saints and Sailors,” described himself as “a walking open wound, a trophy display of bruises.” Carrabba understands that a young person’s angst is as fleeting as it is potent, and he speaks as a figurehead for anguish rather than as a victim of it. He is newly fond of the pronoun “we”: “We never learned to keep our voices down, no / We only learned to shout,” he sings, on “We Fight.”įor Carrabba, who is forty-two, despondence is now buttressed by an almost gospel-like optimism. ![]() He no longer speaks to an imagined audience of one but to an entire generation. Carrabba, rather than rely on the demons of his youth, uses his lyrics as a rallying cry for younger people who suffer from evergreen types of emotional distress. On the band’s new full-length album, “Crooked Shadows,” its first in nearly a decade, this transition is complete. His lyrics were eminently shoutable by crowds of thousands: “My hopes are so high that your kiss might kill me / So won’t you kill me / So I die happy,” he sings on “Hands Down,” from 2002, one of the band’s biggest hits.ĭuring the aughts, Carrabba inched away from this hyper-specific torrent of inner dialogue, toggling between an intimate acoustic sound and something more like sweeping stadium rock. Wholesome despite his full-arm tattoos, Carrabba was, in many ways, the perfect pop star: someone who made emotional pain sound like an aspirational state. ![]() A child of punk rock who eventually found a calling as an emo-rock singer, in the late nineteen-nineties-more than a decade after emo’s genesis as a small, community-oriented scene, in Washington, D.C.-Carrabba became a poster child of the genre at a time when major record labels were realizing its commercial potential. In the past two decades, this ability has enabled Carrabba to cut a singular path. Carrabba can mold any sentiment into totalizing torment without surrendering its sweetness. Bieber’s bratty lyrics were defanged, and the chorus-“If you like the way you look that much / Then, baby, you should go and love yourself”-was transformed from a kiss-off into an outpouring of pure reaction. Like Bieber, Carrabba has a knack for vocal melody, but the tone and the intensity of his version made the song anew. But it also demonstrated what separates the band from its peers-in pop, emo, indie rock, and punk alike. The cover version illuminated how much Carrabba shares with the world of mainstream pop. But Carrabba closed the set with an emotionally labored rendition of Justin Bieber’s “Love Yourself,” from 2015, a master class in acoustic pop. All evening, it had performed its blockbuster singles, most of which are known for their pared-down, acoustic intimacy and the epic, agonized wail of the front man, Chris Carrabba. Last summer, the emo-pop band Dashboard Confessional made an unexpected choice at the end of a live show in Central Park. Chris Carrabba no longer sings to an audience of one but to an entire cohort. ![]()
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