What’s that on your Dashboard? Oh, it’s just a Confessional

On Monday night I was invited to go to a Dashboard Confessional concert. While they are not my favorite band, I like some of their songs and after all, I didn’t have to pay!

The band that opened for Dashboard was called Brand New. Let me just tell you that I absolutely loved NOT hearing this band. The reason I loved not hearing them was because by leaving the venue and heading for the bathroom I could avoid the inevitable bleeding of the ears thats comes from hearing really bad loud music. I was surprised that Dashboard picked this particular band to tour with them, considering that the fans of Dashboard tend to like a little more mellow music.

Once the opener was finished torturing 8,000 people and giving hearing aid companies new costumers, Dashboard came on stage. They were shrouded by a huge white sheet as they started playing. A little ways into the song the sheet was ripped to the floor and the fans started screaming. When I say screaming, you have to understand who was sitting behind me. There had to be 15 teenage girls, decked out in Dashboard gear, basically sitting on my shoulder with their voices directed straight into my ear canal. Yeah, it was that loud. It was a good thing that I prepared my ears with a little tissue from the bathroom.

I didn’t know a lot of the songs they were playing, so that made things a little less fun. Near the middle of the show I started to key on the leader of the band, Chris Carrabba. He started the band, and is the heart and soul of the show. If you don’t know anything about Dashboard Confessional, they fall under the category of emo music, or emotional music. (Wikipedia has a very enlightening article on emo if you are interested)

Not knowing much about Chris I watched him closely. He is 5′5″ and has tattoos that fill each of his arms down to the wrist. He dresses casually in a t-shirt, jeans, and a baseball cap. It’s hard to explain, but Chris is very emotional. His songs are about love and loss and dig pretty deep. While he spoke between songs you can tell he has a lot of passion, almost fake passion. As he talked about writing songs and his inspiration I kind of wanted to say, “Are you for real? No one is really that dramatic.” I kept wondering if his band mates in the background thought that he was completely out of his mind because the way he talks is so self-absorbed. It’s like no one feels things as strongly as he does. At the same time I felt like his passion was kind of endearing. There was some kind of wholesome appeal to the man. I quickly dismissed this notion however, because he was a tattooed rocker and probably not that great of a person. More on this later.

The show ended and the band ran off. I knew they would be back, and so did the crowd. Once again all 15 girls shouted in my ear “Encore! Encore!” I was ready to go, and didn’t really want to feed Chris’s ego by cheering for them to come back. Besides, that was the super fans’ job. They came back and started playing “Vindicated,” which was on the Spider Man 2 sound track and one of the songs I really like. It was electric. The people there, including me, ate it up! Suddenly I could see that things were more fun when you just start belting out all the lyrics you know.

Tonight I decide to do a little research on Chris Carrabba on Wikipedia. Despite my judgments, I learned some things that were interesting. The first is that he suffers from stage fright (I can relate). He seems so composed on stage that I pegged him as an overly confident celebrity. The other is that he openly admits that he is Christian and was brought to God through a family tragedy. While I don’t really know what that says about his true character, maybe my initial feeling about his wholesome side was correct after all. It was just another lesson on the ills of judging people.