Dashboard Confessional - Unplugged

I first want to preface this by mentioning an article by Alan Siegal published on The Ringer on July 28, 2022 called “Die Happy: The Oral History of Dashboard Confessional ‘Unplugged’” I will reference this article throughout this post.

Hi Son,

A while back I talked about rock music at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. I was struggling with post-Grunge, Pop Punk and Nu Metal. It was Emo music that began to speak to me. In 2004, Spider-man 2 came out, which was a movie I was really excited about. After seeing the first (Tobey Maguire) Spider-man a few years before, I bought the soundtrack and really got into it. So what music would the soundtrack to Spider-Man 2 bring? The first single released was called “Vindicated.” It was from a band called Dashboard Confessional. The lead vocalist, Chris Carrabba, had this Power Punk type of voice that could go up to high octaves for a man. The rest of the band ensemble was pretty typical. The song became very popular charting #2 on the Billboard Alternative Songs list.

Dashboard Confessional did not start out as a band. The frontman, Chris Carrabba, began Dashboard as a solo project while he was the lead vocalist for a band called Further Seems Forever. Chris mentioned the reason for doing it as:

I was going through something really tough at the time and since I don't write in a journal, this is what I did with it. It was a good way to get it out of my system. I never thought anyone would hear these songs, but I played some for my friends and one of them who owned a little label talked me into recording.

Chris would release an album, “The Swiss Army Romance,” in March 2000. The album was mostly him performing solo with an acoustic guitar. The opening track, “Screaming Infidelities,” would become Dashboard Confessional’s first mainstream hit. However, that wouldn’t come until the release of the second record, “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most.” In the second album, Chris is joined with a bass player and drummer, Dan Bronebake and Mike Marsh. The band toured promoting “The Place You Have Come to Fear the Most” and really started to gain somewhat of a “cult” following. The crowds Dashboard would play in front of began to sing along with Chris, literally line-for-line. It would even get to the point where Chris would just back off of the mic and let the crowd take over. Every show was very interactive. All of this was leading up to 2002. Two years before I really got into the band. And I mean I really got hooked!

Come back to 2004. How would I get to know their music? Back in that day, I could try to download a bunch of mp3s to cobble together their work. Or, I could actually go to the store and buy their music in the “ethical” way. I went ethical. In Maryville, MO there really was only one place to buy CDs and that was at Wal-Mart. I got there and found that they did a MTV Unplugged recording in 2002. So there it was. An “all encompassing trip" ← Yes I just plugged my favorite Pearl Jam song, of Dashboard Confessional. And look, “Screaming Infidelities” was on the tracklist! I have at least one song that I will recognize. So I put the disc into my car’s CD player and let it go! The recording started with Chris saying “So this is Unplugged, thank you guys for coming.” He’s on his lonesome on stage and goes into “Swiss Army Romance.” From the get-go the audience begins to sing with him. It’s so noticeable that their volume is almost the same as Chris’ volume singing into the mic. Now this was my first experience of ever hearing Dashboard Confessional live. Everything I just described earlier, was completely unknown to me. I immediately felt, “holy shit, if everyone in the crowd knows the lyrics and can almost out-sing the vocalist, then they have to be a really big deal.” The entire album was the same way. The crowd sung every word along to Chris Carrabba and at times would take over to where Chris would let the crowd take the vocals for him.

So my perception was that I had missed out on one of the biggest bands of the early 21st century and MTV was fortune to have had them to an Unplugged session for them. Quite the contrary. Even though “Screaming Infidelities” put Chris and Dashboard Confessional on the map, they still weren’t a staple. They really were somewhat of this “underground” cult that Alex Coletti (at that time producer of the Unplugged series) went to a show and was somewhat mind blown asking "How does everyone here know all these words?” Alex would call his boss shortly after his first Dashboard Confessional experience and pitched that doing an Unplugged session with them was a good idea. Chris was actually a big fan of MTV’s Unplugged series. He grew up seeing the iconic shows by Nirvana, Alice in Chains and Eric Clapton. The typical Unplugged show consisted of a “stripped down” version of the discography. Up until this point, Chris and Dashboard were already stripped down. Even after Chris had Dan and Mike form a band, the guitars were already acoustic. So if there’s nothing to strip down, then what? Alex Coletti felt the element that would make this show unique was “what we’re going to do is we’re going to add the pieces that aren’t on the record, which is the audience.’”

The mission that Alex and his colleagues set out on was to find a crowd for this show that could sing every single word coming out of Chris’ mouth. Alex would attend a Dashboard Confessional show in New York and got the names of several fans who attended that concert. Their pitch was to say “We’re having a free Dashboard Confessional concert if you’re interested.” The mission was successful. The attendees to the Dashboard Confessional Unplugged set would be a crowd who would illustrate exactly what it meant to be into Dashboard Confessional.

What I would learn later in life is that the Unplugged session was a jumping off point for Dashboard Confessional. The last song of the set list would be the probably their most successful single in their catalog “Hands Down.” They would release another album between Unplugged and the Spider-Man 2 soundtrack, “A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar” that I would buy immediately after hearing Unplugged. Eventually I would go back and buy “The Swiss Army Romance” and “The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most.” Coming out of the summer of 2004 I was completely bought into Dashboard Confessional. The music and especially the lyrics spoke to me. I was in my early 20s, which seemingly was the demographic that hit the hardest (high school-college) when it came to Chris Carrabba’s writing. One thing I want to make clear is that the lyrics that hit so hard at that point in my life stopped after I met your mom. A lot of what the lyrics described was of heartbreak. Up until I fell for your mom, I was struggling with that. Chris’ lyrics are really incredible. So much so that even Taylor Swift would acknowledge this. Literally within the last few days she said this!

I would read the lyrics to those songs or the specificity of ‘Hands Down’ by Dashboard Confessional, where I’d be reading those lyrics, and I’d just finish reading a line, and just go, ‘Oh my God.’

As I re-listen to Chris’ lyrics I am stuck in awe. He was incredible as once described as "the poster boy for a generation of emo fans in the early 2000s.” If I were to go into his lyrics, it would require an entire new post. Maybe someday I will write about it again in the future. His words and his voice are really what I would describe as the benchmark of the history of Emo music.

So it’s 2004. Dashboard Confessional has released one album and one banger of a single in “Vindicated’ when I got my hands on their music. What was next? Their fourth studio album, “Dusk and Summer.” That record was good but it was a departure of what Dashboard Confessional started out as. For the record the name came from the song “The Sharp Hint of New Tears” where the lyric starts off as:

On the way home this car hears my confessions
I think tonight I'll take the long way

I was fortune to see Dashboard play in 2006, after I met your mom and she had tickets to the music festival but couldn’t go and let me and my best friend from college go to, in what I will always consider to be the Sandstone Ampitheatre in Bonner Springs. It was rough. Chris had been dealing with some cold symptoms and the setting with the crowd and the stage was not intimate at all. One thing about Chris’ vocals is that it requires him to hit high-ass octaves and with a lot of angst behind it. He wasn’t able to muster it that day.

My second experience live was a true Dashboard Confessional experience. It was at the Uptown Theater in downtown Kansas City, but it was Chris and no one else. He went through most off the songs that he wrote before “A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar.” I sang along to as many word as I could possibly remember. It was incredible and most importantly this time I got to experience it with your mom.

I would eventually fall off of Dashboard. They continued on with their firth studio album, “The Shade of Poison Trees,” which I tried like hell to get into. It just wasn’t the same. My 3-to-4 year obsession with Dashboard Confessional came to an end. Really the Emo genre came crashing down for me. I would like to think it’s because I found my everlasting love in your mother. The year after “The Shade of Poison Trees” was released, we got engaged. The music that Chris Carrabba did not age well for me. I honestly cannot relate to it anymore 22 years later. In some ways that’s good. However, when I listen to Unplugged as I type this message to you, the nostalgia overwhelms me. It really does take me back to a time in my life where I was coming up to finishing college and not knowing what my love life had in store. The words Chris sung were so perfect because they hit almost every scenario when it came to someone struggling to find their soul mate. He really was incredible as a lyricist and a vocalist. The words and the inflection of his voice were and still are the most perfect I can ever remember. My thought is that Dashboard Confessional is perfect from the age of 14-25. Chris was writing his lyrics as someone who was in that period of their life. What I’ll end with is my favorite lyric from Chris Carrabba. The word “championless” is the first and only time I have ever heard it from the song “The Good Fight.” I don’t know if you will ever search out his work during your adolescence, but if you do I want to be there to listen to it with you.

Hope has sprung a perfect dive
A perfect day, a perfect lie
A slowly crafted monologue conceding your defeat
This purchased rebellion has been outbidded
Denounced and rescinded and left to die championless
Championless
Championless

Love,

Dad