A small, handsome man in a red t-shirt plays an acoustic guitar and sings about his pain: "A walking open wound/A trophy display of bruises/And I don't believe that I'm getting any better." This could be a scene at any coffeehouse near you -- except that when he steps away from the microphone, a crowd of 2,000 shouts every lyric: "And this apartment is starving for an argument/Anything at all to break the silence/So don't be a liar/Don't say that 'everything's working' when everything's broken."

The man is Chris Carrabba, twenty-seven years old. His band is called Dashboard Confessional, and their live shows are an astonishing phenomenon: intensely personal lyrics about heartbreak turned into a visceral community chorus. Granted, most live shows have some people singing along, but the intensity of the response to Dashboard evokes an arena concert by Springsteen or U2, not your average indie cult band in a small club.

After the show, Carrabba meets fans in the parking lot. "He's a person!" whispers one girl to her friend.

"I'll touch his butt," says the other.

The show is in Boynton Beach, Florida, not far from Boca Raton, where Carrabba has lived since his teens, so there are plenty of people with personal connections to the singer among the autograph seekers. One fifteen-year-old, Nathan Lyons, was formerly a fourth-grader in an after-school program where Carrabba worked as a counselor. "He was an awesome teacher, always talking about music," remembers Lyons, who has a band of his own now, No Reply.

"If not for music, I'd be a teacher," says Carrabba. "But I feel like I'm still affecting kids."

Carrabba's parents divorced when he was three; he moved from Connecticut to Florida with his mom. He's still close to many relatives on his father's side of the family, but not to his father. "Chris always had to be heard," says his mom, Anne Dichele. "When he had problems with kids, he wanted to talk to them. It became a family joke: 'Why don't you just hit them?' "

Carrabba spent a lot of his youth skateboarding and got skilled enough to acquire some sponsorships. "I had a small and nondescript career, but I'm proud of it," he says. And he pulled off a few tricks he never thought he could, like a 360 ollie. Skateboarding videos led him to punk-rock bands such as Fugazi; the gift of a guitar from an uncle led him to make his own music.

He always suffered from painful stage fright: In school, he signed up for the chorus and ended up mouthing the words. But he started playing his songs for friends and, as he got more accomplished, joined "every band in South Florida," of which the two most significant were the Vacant Andys and Further Seems Forever.

In early 2000, Carrabba recorded his first solo LP, The Swiss Army Romance. Most of the songs were written as therapy after a bad breakup. "I write albums," he says. "For the story I'm trying to tell, I'm not good enough to write really concise songs." Tweaking a lyric in one of his songs, he decided to call the project Dashboard Confessional.

Carrabba's melodies were chiming and anthemic, but lyrics such as "When did your eyes begin to look fake?/I hope you're as happy as you're pretending" provided catharsis for anyone who's ever gone through relationship hell, which is most everybody. Some called Dashboard Confessional emo, a tag Carrabba resists. (See "What Is Emo?" for more on the genre.) "I'm a singer-songwriter," he says. "I love Elvis Costello, Dyl-an, Pedro the Lion. And even as a band, we sound like the singer-songwriters who have a band: Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen."

Still, the emo tag helped Dashboard Confessional catch on with a growing underground of like-minded young fans who want more emotional depth and complexity from their music than the machine-tooled sounds of teen pop or hip-hop can provide. The bands they embrace -- groups such as Dashboard, the Get Up Kids, Jimmy Eat World and Weezer (with whom Dashboard will tour in July and August) -- don't share a sound, necessarily, but they do share a respect for songwriting, punk's DIY ethos and a willingness to wear their hearts on their sleeves. Carrabba began touring with his bassist pal Dan Bonebrake backing him up, and as his audience grew he gradually added drummer Mike Marsh and even some electric guitar. Last year saw the EP Drowning, the album The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most (with a few songs repeated from Swiss Army), and the swelling crowds belting out every word.

"Chris was a camp counselor for years," his mom says. "So when he's onstage, it's like he's doing a really big singalong."

Places has already sold more than 200,000 copies, and it's just beginning to get radio airplay. The single "Screaming Infidelities" is in MTV rotation, and the band just taped an Unplugged2.0 for MTV2. "I saw him a year ago and called my boss, Van Toffler [MTV Networks president], at midnight," says Alex Coletti, producer-director of Unplugged. "I left him a message, saying, 'Dude, you've got to listen to this.' The next day, he asked, 'Were you high?' " (For the record, Coletti was sober, just exhilarated.)

"They're great songs, great lyrics, and Chris is pretty fearless," Coletti says. "I think we're just seeing the beginning."

Any wider success means that early fans long for the way it used to be. Carrabba started off playing Dashboard songs seated on a stool. "Some kids are purists," he reports. "They ask, 'Where's the stool?' I didn't realize the stool was the star of the show!"

Carrabba picks up his clothes at a Florida laundromat. "Is this your sock?" asks the attendant.

"No, all my socks are black," Carrabba replies.

Carrabba likes order and symmetry in his life, and he goes to some lengths to achieve it. The two elaborate tattoos on his forearms are basically mirror images. He's never done drugs and has a beer every two weeks or so. He eats the same meals most days: a cup of coffee and a muffin for breakfast, a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for lunch, and another peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich for dinner. "I think that's why I got so thin on the last tour," he says. "I came home and I weighed 118 pounds."

Carrabba is generous: His mom tells me that the very first thing he bought with his recent influx of cash was a car for his brother. And he's not without his sweetly goofy moments, as when he confesses his crush on Katie Holmes. But when we talk, although he is thoughtful and sincere, he is also extremely cautious. "I'm very guarded," he says, not apologizing. "I may be a very minor public figure, but I'm an extremely private person."

Why?

"It's just safer to be guarded than not to be guarded. You don't run the risk of letting people in."

Part of what makes Dashboard shows so gripping is the contrast between Carrabba's confident performance and the naked insecurities he sings about. That duality exists in his personal life, too: "Some family events and some personal events made me turn very dark," he remembers. "I was putting on such a great game face, but it was all solidifying inside. I decided I wanted to be shaped by what I believed, not by tragic things."

Asked what the title of his autobiography would be, Carrabba replies, Every Day Is a Quiet Disaster. And then he smiles.

[From Issue 901 — July 25, 2002]