Dashboard Confessional's Chris Carrabba Reckons with the Legacy of Emo
A frank conversation with the king of sad stuff.
By Chris Gayomali
Photography by Alex Reside
In conversation, Chris Carrabba talks in hushed, gentle tones. His speaking voice is candid and remarkably on brand (= "emo"), not unlike the sound made by a soft flutter of dandelion wishes scattering in a warm breeze. It's kinda palliative. As if Chris Carrabba were in a constant state of telling you, and only you, the most special person in the world to him—at least for those 35 minutes and 32 seconds you're on a spotty phone call while he's somewhere up in Canada on tour with his band, Dashboard Confessional—a cool secret. His heart is yours to fill or burst. Or maybe break or bury. Or wear as jewelry.
Now 42 and happily married, Carrabba has carved out a career as an artist whose whole deal is plumbing the innermost sanctums of feeling stuff, oftentimes without subtlety: heartbreak, revenge, the best days, not-so-good days—those are all his bread and butter. That sort of raw and naked earnestness that Dashboard traffics in ("you are the best one of the best ones!"; "I wish that I was anywhere, with anyone, making out") acts as its own kind of force shield in that it renders Carrabba impervious to ordinary people shit like "feeling awkward" or "being embarrassed." Why use irony as a deflection tool when you've already put all the potentially cringey stuff out there? It's not very 2018, but it is kind of genius. There is a purity to the Dashboard pathos that is unimpeachable.
In his band's new album, Crooked Shadows, which Carrabba recorded "in [his] basement" because "I've realized that maybe you're most connected to the song in those moments where you're still writing it," he grapples openly with what it means to feel stuff and make art that still resonates with fans as your own bones get creakier. We talked about chasing feelings, his role in helping shape rock music today, toxic masculinity in emo, and everyone's favorite topic...
GQ: So, Taylor Swift. Can you tell me the story of how that video of you playing her party came about?
Chris Carrabba: I mean, I want to make it more of a great story that's filled with mystery. But the fact is that Taylor's been a good friend! She's come to my shows. Everybody's a regular person, no matter how incredible they are. She just asked me to come and play the party, and asked if I would sing, and I said yes. It was a lovely gesture, because it was a song that [she and all her friends] had really embraced together and had some special moments to. I got to be included this time.
In your new album's first track, "We Fight," there's this lyric that jumped out at me: "We found a way to make some tracks / we didn't snicker and turn our backs." You sound relieved that you were able to make a song again. Is that a fair read?
I think so. But it was also a sense of conviction that we haven't finished yet. I think that, in that line, I was accepting that we had gotten popular. Sometimes that can just really undo your relationship with the people who listened to your music initially, and also the scene that you're from that shaped you to become the musician you are. I think I'm proud that we didn't do that. We withstood. We didn't get sucked into the trappings of fame or popularity. And I'm so glad that that was unappealing to us.
That idea of release—of catharsis, I guess—is the defining trait in your biggest hits. "Hands Down." "Vindicated" had it, too. Is that something you still find yourself chasing as you've matured as an artist? Is that feeling harder to find?
It's not harder. It is a feeling that I'm looking for as a writer. But it's not harder. It's always been hard!
I ask that because when you're young, everything you're feeling feels very new and foreign. That's why emo was so forceful. You're experiencing an emotion like heartbreak essentially for the first time. As you get older, reality forces you to harden yourself. Is it difficult to reckon with that as you get older as an artist? Is it harder to make art when you're contented with where you are in life?
Well, you have to allow yourself to be contemplative. Continually. It's easier to get wrapped up in the rigors of what your life is—in the confines of it—instead of dropping everything to write a song because you got the hint of an idea. I think I've just set myself up to be willing to chase it when there's a hint of it still.
You said that when you're young, you feel like you're experiencing these things for the first time. That is true. But that's the weird thing about these experiences. It is continually new. You just have more things to compare it to.
I think that, when it comes to writing songs, I kind of find a way to surrender. I'm more….
[Carrabba pauses for a while.]
A more, I guess, "unguarded" spot. An equally unguarded-slash-selfish spot.
What do you mean "selfish"?
When I'm writing, I have to allow that to be the most important thing that I could possibly be doing. That's what happens with a lot of people when they make more and more records. There's more important stuff that comes around. Responsibility creeps in, and it's necessary and wonderful. But I think you have to make an agreement with yourself: When a song begins to feel like a real thing, you're just going to have to let that be the moment you're going to be in. And not be distracted and be selfish. Not meet your friend like you said you were going to. Or finish your bills. Or route your tour. Or whatever else your responsibilities are.
Would you say that writing a song is a painful process for you?
No, no. Not being able to write a song is a really painful process. Writing a song is like a windfall of satisfaction.
If you're agonizing over a song for too long, do you just sort of give up on it? I'm interested in what that writing process looks like for you.
The truth is, the songs that seem to have the most lasting connection with my audience and for me are the ones that just sort of come out of thin air almost fully formed, and I don't labor over them too much. I wish it was the other way around, just because you're working so hard. You have these songs that you work on—and I'm talking like a couple hours—and these are songs you're working on for weeks, and by rights those should be better, you know what I mean? If you were an architect, that'd be the better end result.
When I look at my work, I've almost gotten more nit-picky, and in some ways less confident in my abilities. I'm always looking back at my work and just hate most of it. As an artist, how do you evaluate yourself?
I think I have a healthy balance of awareness for what was good work and what wasn't good work. But I have no lack of affection for the songs that didn't have legs. Because I feel like somehow, those led to maybe the next good song. And I couldn't have gotten there without that one.
[In some ways] I feel like I would rather have an "excellent song" or an "awful song" than a "good song." Sometimes when I look back, it's just the ones that are kind of "good" or whatever—those are the ones that gnaw at me a little.
You've talked before about how emo was a response to this really tired notion of masculinity in rock 'n' roll. Early in your career, did you sort of realize that you were participating in something that, at least at the time, was perhaps progressive?
It felt reactionary. I don't know that I had a sense that it was progressive. But I felt like I was part of something. And I felt like the thing I was part of was something that eschewed the nonsense of what had become the defining earmarks of rock 'n' roll.
You don't have to name bands per se, but could you be a bit more specific about what kind of rock you're referring to?
I hate to do that. I hate to call anybody out. I do think there was a merit to what [those bands] were doing. I think you only do what you feel from the heart. And I don't think that because rock was hyper-masculine or grandstanding or seemingly egoistic that it was without artistic merit, at least from the perspective of the creators of those songs. I hate to bash it.
It's just... Who was this even for? It's only for the band that wrote it to be able to brag and tell us how fantastic they are. That didn't really resonate with how I felt inside. I was really happy that they were so wonderful. Good for them. But it didn't do the thing like when I discovered The Cure or a lot of those post-hardcore bands that I fell in love with when they made me contemplate my place in the world, and also said things that I felt but didn't know how to say.
When I first saw your MTV Unplugged performance in high school, I remember I thought, Wow, this guy is laying it all out there. I think this ability to express yourself ended up being net healthy for young men overall, and something you helped broker. Do you feel a responsibility at this stage in your life to sort of help further this conversation of what healthy and maybe even thoughtful masculinity looks like?
I don't know that I feel a responsibility to do it. But I'm interested in doing it. It's hard to say what my responsibilities are. It's tricky. But that's still interesting to me. I'm acutely aware that we're not there yet. I feel lucky to still be a small part of the mechanism of change that's going on.
I know you've talked about the [sexual-assault allegations against] Brand New's Jesse Lacey, whom you've toured with, before. For me, so much of the music I loved from that era had these really gendered overtones that haven't aged well. You were pretty good about it, but then I look at bands I loved like Glassjaw, and there are parts of it that were incredibly misogynistic, and that's something that I struggle with today. Is that something you think about? Was there music back then that you look at through the lens of today that you're just like, how did that work?
I'm not really sure that I gravitated towards those bands as a fan, for the same reason I didn't gravitate towards the things we were talking about before. My corner of the scene really wasn't misogynistic. Granted, I think I was singing about a girl, and it happens to be a breakup song, but I never felt misogyny creeping into my songs...
Oh, I didn't mean to imply that your songs were misogynistic! I think you did a better job than a lot of other bands.
But I wonder if what you're talking about [is] that these were basically kids who were trying to figure out their emotions. Some of them were eloquent and understood they were culpable for wherever they were, to an equal degree or some degree. And then there were others who were hurt and angry and needed to say so. It was a cathartic thing that they needed to say.
Can I just say largely, though, that I think compared to other scenes, this scene I come from is really not a misogynistic one? But those bands that maybe had some leanings toward that, I don't know if I noticed that—there were so many women, girls and women, at the shows singing along. It felt like a genderless statement for a lot of these things. Sure, the singer happened to be male. But they were talking in the way about what I or she or he might feel. And they happened to be a dude singing about a girl…I don't know! I'm not well versed enough in other people's catalogs to be able to make a unilateral statement about that.
I would love your assessment on why you think there weren't more successful women making emo music back then.
Emo was an offshoot, an arm, of the punk-rock scene. It took a while. I just don't remember a lot of women doing punk rock or pop punk. I couldn't tell you why. It just wasn't a normal happenstance. I've had women in most of the bands I've been on. I've had female singers on every Dashboard record, and four of the members in Twin Forks [one of Carrabba's other bands] are female. I just think it was a moment in time. It took Phoebe Bridgers and Diet Cig to come out. Those were people that were listening to bands like mine at the time.
But it seemed to be at the time that the women that I would have considered, the ones who I thought were doing something akin to what we were doing, were people like Fiona Apple, and maybe like Tori Amos before her. And quite frankly, they just got a lot more famous than us! They just weren't associated with our scene.
I was inspired watching these punk bands play, but there's something masculine about that, right? So maybe it didn't inspire women the same way. But then we come out. And it's not that it isn't masculine, it's just universally personal, somehow. I'm up there, unadorned, with an acoustic guitar, and a woman sees me play and thinks, I want to say what I want to say like that. A couple of years later, they've learned how to play guitar and sing well. And now they're pushing the boundaries forward.
Are there any artists today in that sort of lineage who excite you to see this happening?
I just named a couple, but I'm really obsessed with Diet Cig on the more punk end, and Phoebe Bridgers on the more singer-songwriter end of things. I think they're so, so good that I'm terribly jealous. Now it's not "can you name any?" It's "who's your favorite?" There seems to be as many bands with singers that are female-led, and they're saying things I wish I could say. They're saying things that define what I feel, similarly to what people thought when I started. And, of course, Julien [Baker] is probably the pioneer for that...
She's amazing.
Yeah. And what's great, though, is that it doesn't start and stop with her.
Do you ever get tired of playing the hits?
No way. [long pause] I don't know how I could. They continue to be new every night. It's malleable to the moment. They're not just renditions of this thing I wrote and put on a record. They're a living thing that is inspired by the room I'm in, the people singing along, the reaction they're having. That would really be a bum-out if you got tired of all that.
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