Boca Raton, FL · emo · acoustic

Dashboard Confessional

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Emo's original singalong leader — Chris Carrabba conducting thousands through 'Hands Down' and 'Screaming Infidelities', acoustic confession turned mass ritual.

Dashboard Confessional started in 1999 in Boca Raton, Florida, as a solo outlet for Chris Carrabba, then also singing with Further Seems Forever, though he left that band before its debut came out. The name comes from a line in "The Sharp Hint of New Tears," a song on his debut, The Swiss Army Romance. A second solo record, The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, and an EP, So Impossible, followed under the Dashboard Confessional name.

Those early records were largely acoustic and diaristic, Carrabba's voice pushed to the front over sparse guitar, with lyrics that audiences learned word for word. By 2002 three more musicians had joined, and an MTV Unplugged session turned into the band's first full-band recordings, catching the call-and-response singing that has marked its shows since.

The video for "Screaming Infidelities," starring Carrabba, won the MTV2 award at the 2002 MTV Video Music Awards. The following year's A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar reached number two on the Billboard chart, the band's most commercially successful record to date, and Dashboard Confessional toured behind it with Brand New that fall.

"Vindicated," recorded for Spider-Man 2 in 2004, widened the audience further and was later folded into most editions of Dusk and Summer, produced by Daniel Lanois and released in 2006. The band toured that record with Say Anything and Ben Lee before co-headlining an arena run with Brand New.

The Shade of Poison Trees, released in 2007, pulled back toward the stripped-down acoustic harmonies of Carrabba's first two records, following the fuller rock sound of A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a Scar and Dusk and Summer.

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