Revisiting Dashboard Confessional, 25 Years Later

Sometimes the best music is the most embarrassing music. That's part of the magic of art: the mystical properties that can make a work simultaneously vulnerable and uncomfortable and alluring and groovy. A desire to jam and to hide my face in my hands—that is Dashboard Confessional to me.

Dashboard Confessional, the final boss of 2000s emo pop, was the brainchild of Florida boy Chris Carrabba, the jet-black-haired (and side-burned) original tattooed sensitive guy, with his Abercrombie chic of tiny shirts and tight jeans and a silly armband. Brooding with a sleeve of tats, you know he might be trouble, but in that irresistibly wounded, emotionally expressive way. "Yes," your brain tells you, "I can fix him."

Dashboard formed in 1999 and put out their first album the following year, but their breakthrough came with their sophomore effort, The Places You Have Come To Fear the Most , which turned 25 last month. The year is 2001, and Carrabba and Dashboard Confessional have become an MTV staple. "Screaming Infidelities," a years-old song that had already appeared on their first album, is suddenly a big hit. The band has begun to ride the line between teeny-bop twee punk for the TRL set and the go-to punchline of every derisive joke about the cloying excesses of the fake genre that is emo, while simultaneously being a quality band with great, karaoke-ready pop songs. For my part, I am a 12-year-old boy, and they are the band I don't want anyone to know I am listening to ... even as I listen to them all the time.