Remarkably, the ‘e’ word doesn’t come up once. You know the one. Over the course of a freewheeling, career-spanning conversation, it just doesn’t seem to merit a mention. Perhaps that’s as strong an indicator as any of how far Chris Carrabba has come in the wider public consciousness since he first emerged two decades ago, under the largely solo stage name of Dashboard Confessional.
Armed with an acoustic guitar and a clutch of spirited, angst-filled yet striving-for-better songs, he found a loving home among a generation of sensitive young men and women left feeling somewhat alienated by the brusque macho posturing of the nu-metal bands who were in vogue at the time.
He’s almost exactly how you might imagine him to be, too – even still. Softly spoken and taking tremendous care to consider the correct wording for every thing he says so as to be understood as intended, we find him at home in Nashville, Tennessee, welcoming us into his world with a painfully polite apology for not having had enough coffee today.
“I slept in my own bed last night,” he says, looking on the bright side. “I guess in my life that’s pretty rare.”
Aside from easily rectified caffeine woes, Chris is in good spirits. One of the reasons being that he’s recently shared his Now Is Then Is Now project with the world, billing it as a “special, surprise reimagination and re-recording” of three of the four Dashboard studio albums released between 2003 and 2009. It was a period of time marred by increased major label interference in his artistic output, which left him with regrets and a sour taste in the mouth, which contributed to the nine-year wait for 2018’s Crooked Shadows. But now he has versions of those songs much more in line with his original vision, and closer to the style and sound of 2000 breakthrough The Swiss Army Romance, and the campfire sonics of its MTV-conquering follow-up, The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most, one year later.
There’s a lot to unpack, looking back, for an artist (almost) at ease in his own skin again.
What were your earliest musical rites-of-passage moments?
“Like all kids, me and my brothers would play soccer, baseball and basketball, but we also pretended to be in bands and we’d pose with our tennis racquets like they were guitars. That’s my earliest musical memory. Then there was my uncle Jimmy, who I spent a lot of time with – he taught me how to skateboard and ride motorcycles – and I remember he had a guitar that I saw him play once. I don’t recall him being bad or good, I just knew it was only once I saw him pick the thing up and it was like magic to me he could make that thing do that. I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s something going on here that I don’t yet understand, but I need to.’”