HOW TO GO
What: Dashboard Confessional, Third Eye Blind
When: May 31, 7:30 p.m.
Where: PNC Pavilion at Riverbend Music Center, 6295 Kellogg Ave., Cincinnati
Cost: $38.50-$53
More Info: (513) 232-6220 or www.riverbend.org
For the past four years, there have been vague rumblings about a new album from the seminal emo band, Dashboard Confessional. Unfortunately, there are still only rumblings, even as Dashboard embarks on a fresh tour with Third Eye Blind, stopping at the PNC Pavilion at Riverbend this weekend.
“I have piles of demos but that’s not where I want to start,” said Chris Carrabba, Dashboard’s vocalist and principal songwriter. “The closest thing I’ve gotten to determining the whens and hows is that it’s worth considering. I don’t have a timeline.”
Dashboard Confessional first came to prominence in the early aughts with their albums “The Swiss Army Romance” and “The Places You Come To Fear The Most,” featuring agonizing, heartfelt songs about heartbreak and romantic betrayal. Although Dashboard was a full band, the songs frequently had a stripped-down feeling, with Carrabba’s voice and his acoustic guitar front and center, making the emotions seem all the more raw. It was a quality that made him a poster child for the genre known as “emo,” a term that mutated heavily as the years passed.
“(Emo) became a catch-all, for bands that I couldn’t see any connection to, to the point where we were left out,” Carrabbas said. “It went from being a neutral classification of a genre like hip hop — a noun, not a verb — to a punch line and an insult, and that bothered me a little. I thought it was disrespectful to those who came before me who were so important. It’s still a joke to some people, but I think with the passage of time, it’s back to being a noun. I’m not sure what other bands are emo, but I’m pretty sure we are.”
Dashboard Confessional released their last original album in 2009. In 2010, they toured to commemorate the 10th anniversary of “A Swiss Army Romance,” and Carrabbas was pleasantly surprised to see the fans he thought he’d lost.
“I saw people who didn’t really latch onto the second phase of Dashboard,” he said. “We lost fans when I added electric guitars, even though I think a few of those songs legitimized us in a way, even though we never had a radio hit. But it was nice to see that you don’t lose people forever. Fandom is interesting. For some, Dashboard begins with (the 2006 album) ‘Dusk and Summer,’ for some it stopped after the first one, for others, it goes all the way through. I’m the same way.”
After 2010, Dashboard Confessional went on hiatus as Carrabbas went to play with other bands.
“We’d been playing 220-300 shows a year for 10 years,” Carrabbas said. “The bedrock of Dashboard is predicated on us delivering something directly from the heart, and I was feeling dangerously close to the point where I’d be just singing the songs. So we had a meeting, and it started with, ‘Who’s burned out?’ And the answer was, ‘Everybody.’ Our audience is savvy. It would take them only one show or one tour to see we were phoning it in. So I walked away before that happened. It wasn’t a wise financial move, but it was wise for the fans, the people who made our career. You have to dance with who brought you.”
Unlike Third Eye Blind, Dashboard Confessional doesn’t have a new album to promote but Carrabbas was vague on what fans can expect to hear other than just songs from “our catalog.”
“We’ll be culling pretty equally from every record,” he said. “I’m sure there’s one we’re favoring, but I’m not sure which one that is yet.”
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