Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba. Photo By: Nelson Hua.
Article and Interview By: Lisa Occhino
Dashboard Confessional frontman Chris Carrabba has announced that he will play eight solo acoustic shows in Midwest and East Coast cities between November 17 and December 4. The tour will hit clubs in Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia.
“Last year around this time, I did a solo tour for the 10-year anniversary of the Swiss Army Romance record,” Carrabba says. But this time, neither Carrabba nor the audience will know which songs to expect. “Well, it would be foolish not to play some Dashboard songs, but I’ve been working on a lot of new music lately,” he explains. “I’m not exactly sure what I’m gonna play yet when I get up there.”
The beginning of Carrabba’s career, he says, was “almost exclusively me and a guitar.” Eventually, the number of musicians on stage grew to eight, until he decided to do his first solo tour last year. “It was kind of terrifying going into it,” says Carrabba. “There was no safety net; you live or die on what you’re able to do by yourself. It’s a pretty scary business, but I also think that if you’re comfortable, then you’re probably not getting any place new. I really got so much out of that, and I kind of felt that I should stay there a bit longer. That isn’t to say that I don’t miss playing with my bandmates – I do all the time – but I just feel like there’s a little bit more to discover with what I want to do as a performer and a songwriter.”
As for his new material, Carrabba thinks the best way to test it out is to gauge the reaction at his live performances. “Sometimes you don’t know if a song is a song until it rises and falls in front of an audience.” Interestingly, he told The Berklee Groove that his favorite part of performing live is the inaccuracy of it. “You get one shot and you’re not gonna get it all right. When you get it really wrong, it’s a train wreck. But when you get it a little wrong, and you’re there for the first time and you’re in front of people, that’s the best part.”
So how did Chris Carrabba end up where he is today as the frontman of Dashboard Confessional? “It was a bit of a winding road, but I think it was an old-fashioned work-hard-make-good kind of thing,” he says. “I got into a van and I toured for a couple years with no record deal, no tourmates, no booking agent, no manager, no nothing. I just booked my shows and built it organically. I was real grateful that people who came to see me would come back and see me again… and they would bring a friend, and they brought a friend the next time, and before you know it I’m here talking to you, all these years later.”
One of the biggest highlights of his career was being on MTV, because “at the time, they never had a non-platinum, and it became such a success.” Carrabba got to collaborate with his musical influences and idols whom he “held up on a pedestal growing up,” he says.
Carrabba believes that the loyal fanbase Dashboard Confessional cultivated over the years is the reason they’re still successful today. “We were able to carve out our own thing without really adhering to the traditional building blocks of how to make a rock ‘n’ roll career,” he explains. “We never set out to make commercial singles. Our career was built around almost being on the radio…There’s part of me that kind of wishes I could write such square songs that could be on every radio station, but that’s just not my lot in life… and now I’m grateful for that.”
Tickets for all of Chris Carrabba’s shows are available online here. The dates are as follows:
Nov 17 — Chicago IL — The Bottom Lounge
Nov 18 — Pontiac MI — Crofoot Ballroom
Nov 19 — Pittsburgh PA — Mr. Smalls Theatre
Nov 20 — Boston MA — Paradise Rock Club
Dec 1 — New York NY — Irving Plaza
Dec 2 — Lancaster PA — Chameleon Club
Dec 3 — Towson MD — Recher Theatre
Dec 4 — Philadelphia PA — Theater of Living Arts
