Interview: Dashboard Confessional's Lead Singer, Chris Carrabba

Austin Scaggs spoke with Chris Carrabba in June 2006. Below is an online-only excerpt of the conversation.

Do you spend a lot on iTunes?br> I spend an enormous amount on iTunes.

How much a week?
My music purchasing . . . I probably buy no less than five records a week, and probably an average of ten or twelve records a week. Mostly on iTunes.

Mostly on recommendations, radio . . . ?
I went through a sort of moratorium . . . There are only a few acts I'll listen to a lot while making records, and usually it's because I know that if they haven't influenced me by now, or if I haven't inadvertently ripped them off by now, I'm never going to.

There was a lot of music that came out this year that I missed, so I've been buying it up in bulk. I buy music for the same reasons everybody does. VH1 had a metal month, so I bought everything, Faith No More records, I bought Appetite for the tenth time -- how come that record can't stay in my hands, I have no idea. Kids tell me bands they're into all the time, and I'm curious, I'm curious about what makes the world go 'round, so that's a pretty cool social thing. It does tend to connect us.

When Neil Young put out his latest record about the war and its effects, he said he wished that someone younger had written it -- a teenager or twenty-year-old kid. Do you think you could write it?
I imagine that I might. Because I find that things live with me longer than they live with other people before they come out in songs. I think I'm just as fed up as anybody else. I talk about it a lot with friends. It takes a while where talking about it with friends isn't where you go, and talking about it in songs is where you go. Inevitable? I don't know.

It's less about war than it is the fact that I've written about a soldier [in the song "Slow Decay," off the newest album.] It seems to be unpopular somehow to do that . . . Like, it's not cool. I wonder myself why no one has done it. My only hypothesis is that it's not as cool as when [Neil Young] was young to write about war. You're not gonna hear a fancy Eighties retro band talking about getting our kids out of there.

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Listening to MGMT’s breakthrough song, one might interpret it as being about the excesses of rock stardom, but it’s actually about the duo’s pet praying mantis. Ben Goldwasser and Andrew VanWyngarden told Rolling Stone they got the idea from the insect's jerky movements. The mantis died, but the two bandmates kept the egg sack and allowed the hundreds of eggs to hatch. “We tried to name them all, but they died after a day,” said Goldwasser, with VanWyngarden chiming in, “But the praying mantis dance inspired us.”

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