![]() " Again I Go Unnoticed" pulls off a similar trick, Carrabba relying on volume and pace to express himself at his most aggrieved, or most isolated. The title track is a tug-of-war between the guitar and dual-tracked vocals that sound like they could be coming from anywhere and everywhere. Musically, the album oscillates between hushed and urgent. ![]() NPR Music's 20|20 20 Years After She Unplugged For MTV, Shakira Taught Me To See Myself On his debut, using an acoustic guitar and his voice and little else, he focused most closely on the mundane - the small and specific heartbreaks and excitements that, when accumulated, make up a lifetime of feelings. Carrabba unlocked this concept early, and has leaned into it heavy throughout his career. Even if, through that process, nothing about them is found to be spectacular, this music relied on the understanding that the very having of emotions was a spectacular feat - that if you missed someone or loved someone or lost someone, it meant you were alive and could shout about the trembling nest of feelings in your corner of this endlessly spinning rock. The Swiss Army Romance, released in March 2000 by the tiny Florida indie Fiddler Records and later given a wide reissue, was the emo of its era distilled to its core purpose - music made to mine and dissect one's own emotions. " Screaming Infidelities" is an overly earnest breakup song, but it works because of how actively pained Carrabba sounds while singing it. I loved this album then, and do now, for how it opens: A body wrapped in a blanket, an absence aching for anyone to fill it, the remnants of a person and how they can haunt a once shared space. The enemy is the mess of emotions that one cannot unravel themselves from - and even then, through the unraveling, the enemy becomes beloved. But it helps that in Dashboard songs, the beloved rarely becomes the enemy. I'm not as jaded or as angry as I used to be, and my pathways to cynicism are found outside of music these days. If I'm weighing my damage as a fan, I don't think I can say that I've broken even: So many songs from the years when I loved this music most feel less approachable to me today for the recklessly imbalanced lens they place on relationships. Whether the emo music of the 2000s and its many offshoots have done more harm than good is in the eye of the beholder. But when Carrabba brings his songs to town, me and everyone I know go to see him - even though we know exactly what we're getting, and how we're getting it. No one told him he wasn't in Cleveland, and I suppose that's one way to return affection. A few summers ago when the Cavs and Kyrie Irving hit an impasse, he stepped to the mic and told the crowd that we had to do all we could to keep Kyrie here in town. ![]() ![]() He comes to Columbus so much because he loves it, he assures us. ![]() At the height of these in-between moments - in early spring, where a person walks out of a house and immediately realizes they are either underdressed or overdressed, or later, as the summer slowly undresses itself down to the bare fluorescence of autumn - Chris Carrabba and his band arrive, usually playing one of the first or last outdoor shows of the year. That shift takes longer these days, what with the injured planet the heat and humidity can lap at the edges of the nighttime well into September, sometimes early October. In Columbus, Ohio, Dashboard Confessional always seems to blow in with the shift of the Midwest season. Kelly Kaufman Wisniewski/Courtesy of the artist Chris Carrabba performs as Dashboard Confessional in Davie, Fla., circa 2000. ![]()
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