Dashboard Confessional Talk Returning To 'The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most'

Rock bands have long celebrated some of the pivotal albums of their careers with dedicated anniversary tours, playing their most iconic records end to end in celebration with their audience. And that’s exactly what Dashboard Confessional are doing when they perform at the debut Good Things Festival in early to mid-December. The long-running American alternative/acoustic rock outfit will play their crucial second album, The Places You Have Come To Fear The Most, which was released way back in 2001, in full for their ravenous Aussie fans.

Vocalist and co-founding member Chris Carrabba is well aware of the potential for disappointment that this creates between the band and hardcore fans devotees of the record.

“Let me put it this way, I felt very relieved to find myself proud of the songs,” he laughs, “I know it’s a tall order, for some people this is a very important record, they’ve listened to it many, many, many times, and they still may listen to it many times. But I don’t listen to it, I mean I play some of the songs from it, but I don’t listen to the record. I’ve got to make sure, first and foremost, I’ve got to hope that I instinctively connect to what they connected to and then deliver that.

“It’s more important to get the chords right,” he adds, laughing again, “which I will, maybe not today, but I will!”

Of course, this begs the question, has he or will he be listening to the album itself in the lead-up to this tour, especially the tracks that may not have been in the live set for quite some time, or at all? “I haven’t listened to it yet, at this point,” he admits. “I’ve just played them, and probably wrong! I’ve just been playing them and playing them, and kind of letting the nuances of however they feel right now be what the songs should be.

“Probably in a week or so I’ll actually go back and listen and find out just how flatly wrong I am.”

And even some the songs that have been played regularly in the live set over the past 17 years or so will have to be revisited and possibly re-learned in their original form and with their original arrangement in order to appease the fans still hooked on their original incarnations. “Of course," he says. "Some of those songs have been in the set for a long time, and what’s been fun has been going back to the original versions, because songs evolve. In fact, they must evolve, we play live all the time, we play hundreds of shows a year.

“I mean, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played Screaming Infidelities in my life, but it’s more than ten!”

Although he hasn’t listened to the record at this moment, he is very confident that, when he eventually does, it will still stack up nicely to his own ears after so long, in a sound and songwriting sense. This is mainly due to the fact that they approached its recording with the KISS principle firmly in mind; aka 'Keep it simple, stupid'. “I feel it benefits from not being over-produced,” says Carrabba. “It’s just a stripped-down record. In fact, our first two records were, it’s a simple aesthetic and that was by design.

“That was our MO, there would be adornments like drums and a bass guitar, maybe a little piano, but essentially it should be able to live with just a guitar and a vocal. And by keeping that as the focus, I think it ended up having longer legs than some of the records I made later, which were very modern in their time, but now maybe show the trappings of the production tastes of other times.”