There’s something decidedly otherworldly about a Dashboard Confessional show. All around, frat boys doff their Von Dutch hats in respect to a higher power, girls swoon in the throes of rapture, and if faces were planets, the tears flowing would be the Great Deluge a thousand times over. If the language here smacks of religion, dear reader, you’re guessing correctly: Dashboard’s frontman Chris Carrabba, having spent the last six years in the relentless spotlight of emo’s sacrificial altar, has been much maligned—or gloriously martyred, depending on who you ask.

Starting at the bottom of the Florida hardcore scene, he played with only an acoustic guitar in the shadows of the Marshall stacks around him. It wasn’t long before the force of his transparent lyrics, always couched in grade-A melodies, knocked everybody sideways and into their (non-alcoholic) drinks. When asked about this truly singular power of his to win over the ferociously beating hearts of the youth, Carrabba just shrugged, “I’ve been there, you know? I’ve listened to The Cure too.” Influence and ticket sales aside, however, Dashboard has been consistently shunned by the oft-oblique indie world, which grimaces uncomfortably at such theatrics. But ask the majority of teenagers who is saving their lives, and it isn’t Radiohead.

Fortunately, Carrabba remains a stranger to the God complex. Indeed, he has lost none of the candor expected of a former pre-school teacher, an experience of which he says, “No one is going to scrutinize you the way a group a children will...it’s different from playing because all you need is the grandstand of rock n’ roll, and you’re set.” The inherent egalitarianism of his attitude—a telltale vestige of the hardcore background from which he hails—is most likely what drives his admission that even now, on the cusp of his fourth album’s release, he doesn’t think that answers are, well, the answers: “Bands that sound like they’ve got it all figured out are not as interesting as bands that are reaching, and they’re just about there. I hope in ten years I still haven’t figured it all out, and I hope I still sound like I’m getting close.”

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