Dashboard Confessional to entertain emo faithful in Pittsburgh

PITTSBURGH -- Chris Carrabba is pretty chill for a guy who's band is headlining the Taste of Chaos tour.

Not that Carrabba is a stranger to chaos.

As the sensitive, singer-songwriter for popular emo band Dashboard Confessional, he understands emotional turmoil. It's just that he analyzes and expresses his inner unrest with a poetic grace that inspires fans to memorize his lyrics and sing them back to him in concert.

Pittsburgh fans can start warming up their vocal cords for Tuesday's Dashboard Confessional performance at the Petersen Events Center. Pop-punk-emo heroes Taking Back Sunday get second billing, with post-hardcore band Saosin and indie-emo-alternative act the Early November rounding out night No. 4 of the Taste of Chaos tour.

"Pittsburgh has always been so great to us in terms of audience interaction," Carrabba said in a phone interview, seated somewhere in his vintage Stone Roses T-shirt he had dug up a day after that British band released its long-awaited comeback.

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A passionate music fan -- whose current playlist includes alt-country act Lucero, post-hardcore's Beaver vs. Shark, Miami metal band Torche, seminal emo band Jawbreaker, singer Regina Spektor and veteran rockers Blur and the Black Crowes  -- Carrabba was as eloquent, friendly and thoughtful as ever, chatting about the upcoming Pittsburgh show and his last visit to town where he rode his bike and took a ride up one of the Mount Washington inclines.

"It is such a beautiful city," he said.

Fans might use the same description for "May," the catchy new Dashboard Confessional single that premiered last month, reflecting Carrabba's acoustic-based romanticism with lines like "you're a dream and I'm a dreamer" and a chorus of "I've got a ring and it's fit for your finger/I'm in deep and you're pulling me in deeper."

"May" will appear on the album he wrote in secrecy before seeking out a record deal. He took the opposite approach a decade ago while on Interscope Records, or before that with the Vagrant Records label, where he put out alt-rock hits like "Screaming Infidelities" and "Hands Down."

Writing and recording independently this time freed him up to follow his own timetable. Finding the inspiration to write is never a problem.

"It's always hitting you. It's real easy to miss it is the problem," Carrabba said. "That comes down to your state of mind. Where are you mentally? Where are you physically? What else is on your plate?

"One of the big problems for me is expectation. And that's something I was relieved of with this relative anonymity that I decided to go into to start recording," the 41-year-old Nashville resident said.

He started writing as soon as he got home from last summer's tour with Third Eye Blind that had included a June date at Stage AE outdoors.

"Last year was an experiment," Carrabba said. "Third Eye Blind and I have mutual friends and are mutual fans of each other, but we didn't know what would happen together. So we rolled the dice. Both of us aren't terrified of risks. So we kind of figured it would be a fun adventure."

Their under-the-stars Pittsburgh show was well received.

Though Taste of Chaos presents a different beast, according to Carrabba, who anticipates seeing more of the original emo and pop-punk fans who originally supported both his band and Taking Back Sunday.

"I'm very fond of the scene I come from and very fond of the audience that made that scene possible by the sheer force of will," Carrabba said. "None of us got on the radio and then had a fan base. Our fan base got us on the radio, and our fan base got us from playing basements to arenas. And these are the bands from that scene."

Carrabba said he and Taking Back Sunday singer Adam Lazzara, in particular, go back to the "very, very beginning" of that scene before there was certainty either would find a sustainable career.

"It turned into a career thanks to our fans, and so to me this is a return to form. This is like a homecoming."

And yes, he said it's still fine to use the term "emo" for the emotional, melodic brand of punk Dashboard Confessional popularized.

"I know that it's become a four-letter word," Carrabba said. "I know it's something people use when they're trolling on the Internet or click-baiting.

"I know it's also a time-honored tradition for a scene to be built up, admired, lauded then shut down. That's OK. I make the kind of music I like and the fans embrace it."

Before the word "emo" caught on, Carrabba said he and like-minded musicians simply called their unique genre "The Scene" and the people involved in it "scenesters."

"That also became a negative word later, like hipsters became an innocuous term for the way someone dressed or what kind of artisanal cheeses they ate, and became more of an insult."

The hands of time often smooth out such verbal barbs. Call it nostalgia.

"I don't know if that's where it is; maybe there's still a stigma around the word," Carrabba said. "But what I view it as is our fans think of us as emo bands. They think of themselves as emo fans. If they're proud to call themselves that, who am I to be embarrassed to be called that? I'm very proud to be called that."

Though somewhere down the road, he hopes to be back on stage with his Americana band, Twin Forks, which only got as close as Warren, Ohio, on its last tour. Listening to a playback on one of his daily fitness runs, Carrabba is convinced Twin Forks' next album is halfway finished.

"It's much simpler with Twin Forks. There's very little expectation and probably zero anticipation," he said. "But it's something we all do because we really love the band, playing music that's rooted in our much younger years, actually our childhood.

"We came into punk rock in our teens and 20s and that's what really defined us. But before that we were listening to what we'd call folk music or Americana," Carrabba said. "So we just feel that's a long-standing tradition. We like writing like that. And we love playing together and touring. We found our little niche of an audience that likes it, and it's very, very rewarding."

When he's in town Tuesday, keep an eye out for Carrabba on his bicycle. He likes to take a pre- or post-show ride.

Though he laughed aloud and sounded a bit worried to learn the Petersen Events Center sits atop what locals call "Cardiac Hill."

Carrabba said, "I might have to skip my ride that day."