Dashboard Confessional, the widely adored vehicle for emotive post-hardcore songwriter Chris Carrabba, is back with a new song. “We Fight” is the first single from Crooked Shadows, Dashboard Confessional’s first album in nine years. It follows the well-honed Dashboard song model, with plenty of shared angst and big plays at anthemic vocals. “We were the kids that left home probably too young / And we took our share, and maybe then some,” Carrabba sings at the beginning, before rising to something near-political: “We never learned to keep our voices down, no / We only learned to shout.”
In an interview with Zane Lowe, who premiered the song on his Beats 1 show this afternoon, Carrabba emphasized the song’s political edge. It’s not the most nuanced take on the punk scene and its possible failures, but the sentiment is there.
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It’s a weird thing when you write a song; you think you know what it’s about but you don’t until some months later sometimes. So, I thought for sure it was just about how I found a place in the world, which was worth fighting for, which was the music scene that I come from. I wasn’t cool in school. I didn’t fit in. I found this music scene and it fostered this community and it fostered the people in it. You could be black or white, you could be straight or gay, you could be a man or a woman. Everybody was equal and we were equally protected but we were equally encouraged to do something that challenged the status quo. But then the political climate has changed in such a way that, almost days after writing that song, America started to feel really regressive somehow. And all these great strides we made during the last administration had been threatened to be undone and I realized that people have beliefs worth protecting, worth standing up for and I found a residence in that.
Crooked Shadows is out February 9 on Fueled By Ramen. Listen to “We Fight” at the top of the page.
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