The reuniting of Dashboard Confessional frontman Chris Carrabba with his original outfit, Further Seems Forever, is, without a doubt, the big story of this year’s Bamboozle. If you don’t think so, just flip the page over to that quotes feature. Even the bands playing want to see it! So, we here at the good ol’ AQ thought it best if we called up Mr. Carrabba for a quick chat about the whole thing. It also proved a good opportunity to sneak in a couple questions about the new Dashboard album.
How did the reunion come about? Would you even call it a reunion?
I guess you’d call it…I guess it’s a reunion, a one-time reunion. I did this show at the school I went to, at the college I went to in Florida. And since it was a hometown show, I asked those guys to play, and before the show, they asked if I wanted to sing with them, which I, to be honest, hadn’t listened to the record because I don’t really listen to my own tunes. I hadn’t listened to that record in probably a solid year if not more.
So I was like, ‘Oh jeez, how am I gonna pull this off,’ but I said yes because we were having a fun day. Anyway, I got up on stage with the guys and it all kind of came back in a flood and afterwards we were all talking about how much fun it was and that we should do it, and I said I’d only do it if it was the original line-up.
The opportunity came up at Bamboozle for us to do the original line-up, so I called the guys and we talked it over. We had to talk Nick, the original guitar player, into wanting to do it again, and once we talked him into it, we were ready to go.
The anticipation is really high for your set. That must be kind of validating.
It’s nice for us because I was out of the band before we even recorded Moon Is Down, so we’d never had the opportunity to go out there—as a matter of fact, some of the songs, a couple of the songs I did that night when they asked me to sing we’d never done in front of anyone.
And one of the songs we had never played together, like at practice. We’d be at practice and it was only an instrumental at the time. I wrote the vocals in the studio.
For me, I felt like we never had the opportunity to go out and enjoy that spirit of the live moment for these songs, they sort of just lived in this place…
There’s a whole different energy to a live show. I never got to explore those songs in a live setting, so I’m really excited.
Have you rehearsed with them at all?
Yeah. When we said we’d do it, I was on my way home to Florida. So when I got down there, they had just gotten off tour. We got together in their warehouse, we practiced, practiced for a few days.
A couple months went by and we practiced again and they’ve been practicing and I’ve been practicing. But the rehearsals, it wasn’t so much about getting the songs down, because we all knew the songs, it was more about like, let’s get in a room and have a good time together. Let’s just get in a warehouse and just remember what it’s like to be in this band and have fun.
