Back in 2011, after more than a decade of first creating, then defining, emo music with his band Dashboard Confessional, writer, singer and guitarist Chris Carrabba decided that even if the genre had not run its course, his place in it had.
He put the band on indefinite hiatus and briefly reunited with his pre-Dashboard Confessional band Further Seems Forever for a 2012 album. Then he formed the Americana/folk group Twin Forks, with which he released an EP in 2013 and full album in 2014.
But Carrabba says he rediscovered the “emotion” behind emo music when, in 2016, he wrote the song “May” and decided its sound and form were that of Dashboard Confessional.
That summer, Dashboard Confessional got back together — or at least Carrabba and bassist Scott Schoenbeck did. With new guitarist Armon Jay and drummer Ben Homola, it went back on the road.
Two years later, the band is still touring. On Saturday, it headlines Bethlehem’s Musikfest with All Time Low.
That, Carrabba says, is because the band found that listeners also rediscovered emo music.
Carrabba says that while the song “May” was a reconnection with emo — Dashboard Confessional’s first new music in seven years — it took him far longer to reach a place where he felt comfortable releasing a full Dashboard Confessional album.
“I thought it bridged a gap nicely back from Twin Forks to Dashboard,” he says. “I never intended for that to make a record. I just thought it was … for some people who had been paying attention in the interim, when I was on hiatus from Dashboard, that was the piece that was … literally how I got back. This is the song that literally led me back to Dashboard.”
Dashboard Confessional was very much the voice of emo — a genre marked by stirring music, emotional lyrics and often overwrought (the favorite pronoun at the time was “whiny”) vocals. Its 2000 debut album “The Swiss Army Romance” was seen as the genre’s seminal, defining document.
It also was by far the genre’s standard-bearer, with its next three albums selling gold and two of them — 2003’s “A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar” and 2006’s “Dusk and Summer” — peaking at No. 2 on Billboard’s overall albums chart. The live album from its appearance on “MTV Unplugged” sold platinum.
But by the late 2000s, the genre seemed to run its course. The final two albums of Dashboard Confessional’s original run barely cracked the Top 20.
But after releasing “May” and getting a strong response on the road, Carrabba says he wasn’t in a rush to put out a new Dashboard Confessional album.
“I guess it took a while to find the voice of the new record,” he says. “So I took my time. It was important that I felt that I had something powerful to say, or it wasn’t worth saying anything at all.”
Carrabba says he wrote 75 to 100 songs for the new disc, and went through a difficult process of gleaning an album from them.
That disc, “Crooked Shadows,” finally was released in February, as Dashboard Confessional’s first studio album in nine years. It reached No. 4 on both the Alt and Rock charts.
Co-produced by Carrabba, the album is described by record label Fueled By Ramen as “a near decade-long period of immense self-examination for Carrabba … a deeply cathartic body of work that traverses the complications and vulnerabilities of relationships while scrutinizing the possibility of self-improvement.” Carrabba agrees.
One song that really connected the new Dashboard Confessional to its roots is “Heart Beat Here,” which Carrabba says is kind of a sequel to the 2003 song “Hands Down,” which — released after the breakthrough hit “Screaming Infidelities” — gave the group its first Top 10 Alt chart hit.
“ ‘Hands Down’ is a really special song to me. It’s about an experience I had in my youth with a girl that would remain special — well, she’s a woman now — who would remain special to me for my whole life. I married this girl.
“And when I wrote ‘Hands Down,’ I didn’t know that we’d ever be together or anything like that. And so after — I guess I never thought I’d write a companion piece to ‘Hands Down’ about that. But that is what came to pass.”
Carrabba says the song has surprised even him in the way it has connected with audiences.
“Kind of shocking, because it’s not like it’s on their radio or anything,” he says. “It’s just a song on the record, and it seems to be the one that they picked out on their own as one to embrace.”
Another song that has gotten attention is “We Fight.” The album’s first single, it peaked at No. 14 on the Alt chart, giving Dashboard Confessional its highest-charting song in 11 years, since 2006’s “Don’t Wait.”
The song is a rousing battle-cry for the downtrodden that Carrabba says he originally wrote about the music scene from which he arose, “and the fact that it was a place where people of all backgrounds, all races, genders, gender identities, sexual identity, religion, it was a place where they could just be themselves.
“That’s in contrast to kind of the changing narrative of the culture right now,” he says. “That stood in contrast to the scene I’m from and how important it was. It began to be related to the current administration and kind of the regressive nature that I think we need to take a stand against.”
While most of the songs on “Crooked Shadows” have much the same feel as classic emo, the song “Belong” is a bouncy, far-from-whiny tune that incorporates the catchy electro-pop of the DJ group Cash Cash, which was a contemporary of Dashboard Confessional.
“It’s funny how things happen sometimes, you know?” Carrabba says. “We’ve been friends for just so long and we’ve been talking about doing something together for so long.
“So we had played a show together, oh, about, maybe three months before I really finished the record, and we buddied around — ‘When are we gonna work together?’ I had a song — when I wrote that song, I thought, ‘Oh, the spirit — we kind of share an approach to that kind of song.’ So that came to pass.
“It’s friends doing stuff together — that’s my favorite thing.”
Carrabba says said he also intends to continue with Twin Forks. Last year, Dashboard Confessional replaced Homola, who also was Twin Forks’ drummer, with Chris Kamrada.
He says he has been working contemporaneously on a new Twin Forks record, which he says also is almost ready to release.
But a week ago — after the interview took place — Fueled By Ramen announced the release of a new Dashboard Confessional song, “KindaYeahSorta,” recorded at the same time as “Crooked Shadows,” seeming to suggest there’s also a future for Dashboard Confessional.
“It’s amazing. It’s amazing,” he says. “We’re really lucky. Well, we’re such close friends. We’re family, really, you know? And, um, we get to do something that we love so much, and we get to do it together.
“So it’s been a fantastic experience in that regard. It’s been a fantastic experience to … be back playing to these audiences that we care so much for.”
