Interview: Chris Carrabba of Twin Forks and Dashboard Confessional (February 17th, 2014)

Last week, I got the chance to chat with Chris Carrabba (of Dashboard Confessional and Further Seems Forever fame) about his new band, Twin Forks. During the interview, Carrabba opened up about his long-held aspiration to pursue folk music, the slow and steady formation of the new band, an upcoming tour with Augustana, his current feelings about his other musical projects, his opinions on the modern mainstream folk resurgence, and his friendship with Butch Walker. (Note: Click here to read my review of the new Twin Forks record. In addition, you can find Twin Forks on Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud, and on their own website by using the search term "Twin Forks Music" in a Google search.)
 

Craig Manning: First of all, love the new record, really pleased with how that turned out. How did the Twin Forks project come together initially? What influenced your songwriting direction?

Chris Carrabba: Well the band came together…let’s see, let’s just retrace this correctly. Well, I had these songs that I wanted to record – some covers and some originals. The covers were mostly folk stuff I’d grown up listening to and some outlaw country stuff. I ran into Ben, I was playing a Dashboard show at the Troubadour, and Ben had played a few nights before, so the Bad Books guys all showed up.

I asked Ben, who I knew was a producer, if he’d help me out with this stuff. So I started working with Ben on these covers, and then he had to go out and tour with one of the 1,500 bands that he’s in, and so then I got a friend, a guy named Jonathan Clark, to help me with the covers record. So that was the impetus. And these guys hadn’t met, but what they had in common was they had these indomitably positive attitudes, which I found incredibly infectious.

So we worked on these covers [for the 2011 album, Covered In The Flood], and then I started thinking. Ben was still on the road, and Jonathan and I started talking, “Well what could be next?” And I had a lot of Dashboard stuff begun, but maybe not…I wasn’t sure how I was feeling about all that. And at one point he said, “Well why are you…” You know, we had just done all these covers, and if I’m left to my own devices, just sitting around making music, playing music, what I end up playing is stuff from my earliest influences, like Townes Van Zandt songs or Steve Earle songs. I play a lot of, like Woodie Guthrie and Bob Dylan, just the stuff that as a kid I was exposed to that helped me learn to play guitar and compose. And…he said, “Why are you afraid to do what you love?”

That was a really profound kind of question that I didn’t have an answer too. So that was the first seed planted for going back to my earliest roots. And then, I have a…there’s a composer in San Francisco, her name is Dawn and she’s a mentor to a lot of bands, legendary promoter. One of the things she does is called “Hardly Strictly Bluegrass.” So at this point, I’ve begun writing what I guess would have been a Chris Carrabba record, so like, a pretty delicate…like Nick Drake, Alexi Murdoch kind of record. A lot of finger picking, very understated. I thought it was very charming. It felt really good. And she invited me to play this Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. And it was under my own name, there was no Twin Forks, there wasn’t anything. And in the course of this, Ben had come back from his tour, so it was now the three of us working together, and as soon as we started playing together, there was this really magical spark.

But here I’ve got Jonathan, who’s really busy, me in a band that’s really busy. I got Ben, who’s as busy as anybody I know. And so we just kept saying to each other, “We’re not a band, we’re not a band.” So when we got the opportunity to do the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, we said “What a great thing. We can kind of go up there and pretend to be a band and have like a weekend of exciting role play,” or something. (Laughs) So we walked onstage saying “We’re not a band” and we walked offstage saying “We’re a band.” Something happened on that…in the course of that show that just felt radical, like something was changing.

So we came back, and one of the things that we realized was that those small and delicate songs that I wrote, while I loved them – still do – what I loved more was when we played some of the covers that had that boot-stomping thing that really let Ben and John shine. And so we came back and I just began writing from there, where that’s the kind of music I was developing. I’d write a song in the afternoon, we’d listen to it in the late afternoon, and then we’d get in the room together and play it live. So what you got was a really fresh and new song and a really reactionary approach to recording it. And we’re in the same room and there’s all this mic bleed, and I was thinking we were doing demos until we listened back and we though “Oh yeah, that antiseptic thing we’ve all been taught to do in the studio is not going to represent this band well.” This band needed to be represented by the the messy stuff of making the record too.

CM: Yeah, it’s really more organic sounding than the later full-band Dashboard stuff.

CC: Yeah, because the more there is on the line – you know, bigger labels, bigger expectations – there’s a feeling that there’s a way to [make a record] that’s really specific. And that’s like everybody in a different room. Like, “You’ve had your time to play together, now everybody go into a different room and play separately.” And that has its place, and some great, great records are made that way. I don’t know what ones are and what ones aren’t, but like, if you were to tell me that – just to pick one out of the hat – a Killers record was made separately with everybody in the room, I would say there’s no drawback to that, because the power was what was captured. Or Say Anything, another one that has more chaos in it. If you were to tell me that [all the band members] were all in different rooms, I’d say “So what,” you know? It’s not a hard fast rule as long as the power is captured. I think for Dashboard, on the last record or two, sometimes we captured the power, sometimes we didn’t. That’s only my opinion. With Twin Forks, [the different rooms thing] just never would have resonated. It would have been this really clean, maybe forgettable thing. Or sound. The songs I think would still have power, but the sound of it would maybe not have as much.

So then, once the record was done, we started thinking about what would be cool as far as extra instrumentation, and Ben played the drums, and John and I played pretty much everything else on the record. And then we were…looking for that last bit that would make it just right, and I had all these great idea for harmonies, and I would have John or Ben sing the harmonies on the record, or I would sing them – which I never really like to do that, then it sounds like what I call “wall of Chris,” which I don’t really care for that.

And so we thought about Suzie because she had done the cover record with us and she’s such a lovely girl. Well…that’s too small a statement, but she really is…her positivity is on par with what I described from those other two guys, you know? Collectively, those three have like, rays of sunshine hanging out of their ass. You can’t bring them down. Sometimes, the work of being in band…being in a band is the best. It’s work though. Nobody really wants to know that. You don’t want to know how sausages are made, right? But a lot of it can wear you out, can bring you down, can bring me down. Not these guys.

So all of that being said, that was the final piece of the puzzle. We invited Suzie to come down and sing. I mean, first thing we did was play together, and it was like, “Oh yeah, there’s no question here.” And then we began to record that stuff and it was just…I’ve rarely had such an ease with decision-making. So anyway, that’s how the band came together, and then we did the one show about a year ago and…man, I just can’t believe it. I can’t believe I get another chance in the batter’s box.

CM: The album has been billed as along the same lines as the Lumineers, Mumford & Sons, and other modern folk bands. Folk in general has been able to recapture a place in the mainstream as of late. Were you inspired by the way that listeners seem to be opening up their ears to these older, more traditional styles of music again?

CC: I am now, that’s for sure. Without a doubt. When I began doing it, those bands existed, but they were on the climb. They were just being introduced to the world. I think I’d heard that first Mumford song a couple of times, and I was like, “Wow, that’s it, they got that right, really exciting, love the song.” But I didn’t expect that to work at top 40 radio. I didn’t expect what I was doing to work at top 40 radio. I’ve made a pretty great career out of being on the fringe, being a niche artist. I’ve had some good showings of almost getting some radio recognition, some top 40 success if you will, but only really come close to it. “Stolen” did pretty well on the radio. But generally speaking, I think my whole career was made in a niche scene, and that’s just what I expected with Twin Forks. I thought it would be an even smaller niche.

I’m going to repeat myself here, so if you see this in other interviews, forgive me, but it really is something I stand by with these bands: the Lumineers, the Avetts, the Mumfords, and what have you. Those bands write hit songs. I find it really lucky for me that they are interested in the same kind of instrumentation that I find really interesting. But I think all of those bands write these songs that are powerful hits songs that are just plain hit songs. They’re just incredible. They transcend the style in which they’re played in. [The bands] could have written them as piano ballads, or as the post new wave kind of stuff. But they happened to choose the kind of music and style that I’m so drawn to and that I love so much. I think there would have probably been a period before those bands were on the radio where if a song came on the radio or on Spotify or in a friend’s car that had a mandolin in it, it would be like an immediate skip track or change channel [for mainstream music listeners]. It would have been off-putting. But [the Lumineers and Mumford & Sons] have made it inviting to people to stay on that station, stay on that song, stay with it for a minute, and then if the song’s good, they stay with it.

That’s a really lucky thing for me. I will admit to still being a bit shocked that that actually happened. I think we’re really lucky because I think there was a minute that I though, “If they’re doing that, then we can’t do that.” And then I thought to myself, “Well, it took me a long, long time to get to a place to do this, and I’m here now. I’m not going to run to some other setting because another band exists that does this well.” Because, to be frank, Bob Dylan did it well; Paul Simon did it well; the Eagles did it well. So I thought, “There’s room for us.” I still believe we’ll be a niche band. It would be great [to hit it big] but I don’t have any designs on top 40 radio. All I know that I get to do what I love, and thanks to those bands, people might give it a full listen instead of a 20 second listen.

CM: You guys released an EP last fall, and I think a lot of people sort of thought that was going to be the extent of the project. Did you always intend to drop the EP to gain interest and then go ahead with the full length shortly after or what?

CC: The full-length was done, and it wasn’t about building interest, but an excuse to get on tour. Because we’d found a record deal and it was like, “Well the record can come out in January,” and we were like, “Next January?! Is there any way…anything, just to go on tour?” Because I think I’ve made no bones about my draw to the touring world, it’s just where I feel most centered. So they let us do the EP. They kind of just said “If you’re expecting a lot of promotion for an EP, let’s temper the expectations, but if you want to put this EP out and just go on tour, you absolutely have our blessing. And when it comes time to release this record, it will be our time to shine. The label’s time to shine.” But [the EP] was never intended as the be all and end all, and it wasn’t really intended as a thing to stoke a future fire. For me, it was a means to an end to be out in front of people.

CM: How did you choose the songs from the album that did and did not make the EP? I was really interested when I heard the full album, because even though it’s half the same songs, I think it has a completely different mood and personality and pacing. You saved a lot of the slower, more balladic tracks for the LP, and the EP was more of the more upbeat, handclap stuff. Was that a conscious decision? Were those the songs you wanted to play live, so they got on the EP?

CC: Probably, probably so. We didn’t put all the hand-clappers on the EP. There’s still a few that we saved for the record. But that’s the piece of the band that I think encapsulates the identity of the band more than anything else, so that’s the choice that was made.

CM: Listening to this record compared to some of the Dashboard stuff, I think there were definitely folk stylings sort of creeping in on the last few records, specifically with the acoustic version of Alter the Ending and on the second half of that record with songs like “Even Now” and “Water & Bridges” and “Hell on the Throat,” I think those were sort of moving in the style that you’re doing with this. Were you already sort of thinking about writing folk songs back then, or was it just what you were listening to and it was a subconscious thing.

CC: I think it was a little subconscious in that some of those influences were just coming out happenstance. Because I wasn’t…as I mentioned to you, I hadn’t quite had that epiphany yet that I was allowed to make that kind of music, that I was going to allow myself to make that kind of music. Interesting that you say that, because I haven’t really thought about that, but I totally agree with you. Like specifically “Hell on the Throat.” That’s pretty much just a folk song. And now that I think about it, especially the acoustic version of “Water and Bridges.” The style of that, the structure of that is a folk song. Interesting, interesting. Sometimes you do things subconsciously before you are consciously aware that the path is there.

CM: Speaking of Alter the Ending, I think come November, it will have been five years since that album came out. Dashboard Confessional hasn’t released an album this decade. What’s the status of that project? Is it done? Is it indefinitely on hold? Do you have plans to record another Dashboard album at any point in the near future?

CC: I love Dashboard. I love my bandmates so much. You know, it’s family. And of course I love those songs. Those songs defined my life, and I don’t mean that the songs themselves chronicled my life, I mean the fact that those songs existed in the world gave me a life that I wouldn’t have lived otherwise. I have every intention of being in Dashboard again. I don’t know when is right. I’ve felt at times since Alter the Ending that it was something I should push real hard for, before maybe interest ran out – I mean the band’s interest – or we just slipped into that forgotten pile of record collections. But neither of those are really the right reasons to make records. The right reasons to make records is cause you…you must make the record. That’s the way you feel. So I’m waiting to feel that way. And I know I will again. But for the time being, that’s how I feel about Twin Forks. And to the degree I hadn’t felt about Dashboard in a bit.

CM: Also sort of on the subject of Alter the Ending, I think comparing that album to this one is interesting because that was, more than I think anything else you’ve done, like this big, bombastic pop production. And you worked with Butch Walker on that, and I just need to ask about him because I’m a huge fan of his work, both as a…a producer and a singer/songwriter and definitely as a live performer. How was the comparison between working with him on this big pop album and then turning around and making this organic, sort of backwoods folk thing? And who produced this record? Was it self-produced by the band?

CC: Yeah, the band produced it, probably in this order: John and then me and Ben tied. We all know how to run the gear, we all know how to structure songs, and we all know how to listen to our gut about what’s right and wrong, so we just did it ourselves. Working with Butch…it’s funny you should bring it up, because I was just texting with Butch this morning about unrelated stuff and non-musical stuff. Just shootin’ it, you know? And I’m a fan of his in exactly the way that you just described that you’re a fan of his. So getting the opportunity to work with a guy like that was a big, big deal for me. And we ended up being kindred spirits and having a real friendship.

There’s no kind of record that Butch couldn’t make. So if I had showed up with songs like [the Twin Forks songs] and said, “can you make a record like this,” you’re telling me Butch Walker couldn’t make the record? (Laughs) The guy’s…there’s very few in his class. But he also, I think, was just…well I’m similar to him in a lot of ways. I’m a writer like he is. I’m a performer like he is. I understand how to work the engineering end of records like he does, and I understand production like he does. There were a lot of times while making that record with Butch that he would turn to me and say, “You can do this.” You know? It’s great to have mentors out there. I’ve spoken about it before. Butch is a good friend, but he’s also a mentor, you know? Like, throwing in little things like that while making a record that had a lot of expectations from the label we were on, that had a definitive style expected…you talked about…did you call it pop, or sleek or something like that?

CM: Yeah, sort of bombastic was what I said.

CC: Yeah, I don’t know. The label had a big…had an opinion in a more…they vocalized it more than they ever had for that record. And so that’s the kind of record we set out to make having been given the marching orders. It was kind of exciting. It was kind of a challenge, like “Can you do this?” “Yeah, I think I can. I think I can do that.” And I’m sure it was reactive to like a couple of the demos I took them that were pretty fully formed and probably sounded like that and they got excited and were like “Yeah, this is it, this is what we want.”

So half the record I did with Adam Schlesinger [of Fountains of Wayne] who’s a real pop guy, and Butch is a rock…guy…believe it or not, though, what he writes…

CM: Oh yeah, he’s definitely a rock guy. (Laughs)

CC: You know, he’s really famous for writing Pink songs and Avril Lavigne songs, but if you ever listen to a Butch Walker song, it’s a rock song.

CM: Yeah, definitely.

CC: So…I can’t remember your actual question, but yeah, I don’t know that Butch decided that’s the style of the record that we were going to make, or I did, or the label did, or we all did. But it is the only one like that that I made, I think.

CM: Definitely. So you’re going on tour with Augustana, right? That’s what’s next?

CC: Yeah, we go to Europe…we go to SXSW, then we go to UK and Europe, and then we come back and do the Augustana tour.

CM: What can fans expect from that tour? Is it going to be all Twin Forks stuff from the new album? Is it going to be a mix between Twin Forks and covers? Are you going to throw in any Dashboard stuff?

CC: I think Twin Forks and covers and Dashboard stuff is a pretty reasonable expectation. I think that, especially when we open for people, they don’t necessarily know who Dashboard was, or they might not know. But in this case, we hosted Augustana, I don’t know, four times or something? So a portion of that audience that came to know Augustana on tour with [Dashboard] will be aware of my other band.

I’m not opposed to playing Dashboard songs. I’m more excited, I’ll be honest with you, to play Twin Forks songs, but I’ve always had – since we started doing this – my own marching orders to myself have been to go out and play Twin Forks songs. And the most I can hope for is that the audience will give Twin Forks a chance to be Twin Forks. And then if I feel like…it’s not about winning [the audience] over, but I feel like if I’ve been given graciousness…like, it’s really hard for me to say no when someone calls out a Dashboard song. It’s a real kindness to allow somebody to grow. To be a fan, become a fan, or just be there to support the challenge of it all. But it’s just really hard to say no when somebody then says, “Play this song I love,” because they’re saying “Play this song that I LOVE,” you know? It’s not like they’re saying “Play this song that…my girlfriend knows!” (Laughs).

But we are really excited to go out with Augustana. It’s been really cool that, so far, two bands that we helped, in whatever small way that we could, established themselves as career touring artists – City and Colour and Augustana – have both turned around and given my new band an opportunity to open for their crowd.

CM: A question from someone on the site: in 2012, you reunited with Further Seems Forever for the first new album in eight years. Was that reunion a one-off kind of deal, or could you see doing another reunion a few years down the road?

CC: Yeah, that’s one the easiest for me to say yes to. Let me re-state that, within the band, it’s easiest for me to say yes to doing the band, because I’m the only one whose job is music. Everybody is really desirous of doing that band. We really enjoy each other. We love each other. We’re talking about childhood friends, you know what I mean? It’s like family. And there’s not really a day or week that goes by where we’re not in contact, and we’re not even in a band together. They’re the most brilliant and funniest guys I’ve ever known in my life. They’re excellent musicians. I’ve seldom been as rewarded through friendships or musical collaborations as I have with these guys.

So my answer is that I really hope we do a lot more. I do understand that it’s going to be less often than any of us would like. I mean, people were patient to wait the eight years the first time, so if they can be a little bit patient along the way as we look for our next opportunity. I don’t know what we would do, I don’t know if like…I’m not sure if people…we toured so little on Penny Black that I’m sure there’s still plenty of places we could go. I mean, people want to hear the old stuff anyway, that’s just the way it works, so I’m not sure that we would make a new record before we toured. I just want to play with those guys in front of people. If it’s up to me – and it might be, I don’t know – I’d like to do shows and tours before another record. I think everybody wants that too, by the way, but it’s a moving target.

CM: Speaking of reunion tours, a few years back, you did a belated 10-year anniversary tour for Swiss Army Romance. And now, I think A Mark, A Mission turned 10 last year. Did you think about going out on the road and doing a few shows to sort of celebrate that?

CC: No, I didn’t think about that. When I did the Swiss Army Romance tour it was because I had talked to so many fans who are still fans from that earliest, earliest stage. And they asked…it was more a foregone conclusion for them that we would be doing something to honor [that album]. And my intention was to go out there and celebrate like, “I can’t believe it, I can’t believe it, what a great milestone in my life.” But then I realized, this fanbase, in a way that maybe doesn’t happen very often, popularized this band and gave me a career through their own hard work. So I decided to do that Swiss Army tour [as a thank you].

And then the Places anniversary came, and the Mark, A Mission anniversary came, and I look at it and I think, “I’d love to play that record straight.” I’d love to play an audience that wants to hear it. But then I feel a little like…I did that once for Swiss Army, and it just feels like…I don’t know, a money grub? To go out and do it again and again? To do it once was this great thing. To do it every time I have an anniversary sounds a little bit opportunistic. And I thought that outweighed the charm of doing it and I thought it outweighed the positive reaction the idea would get from the fanbase. It felt a little bit disingenuous, just to me.

And then of course, I second guessed myself when I saw some other bands I love go out and do some of these records that I love, and I watched the show, and doing this “I know what this means to them” audience because it means that to me when I see X band do X record. But…it might have been different if we were a full-time band who had released records every year of this decade. Like you said, we haven’t done something this decade. I probably would have done it then, because it wouldn’t have just the one thing we were doing. But that’s the piece of it that made me feel like, “This probably looks like I’m just trying to pay my rent.”

CM: So what’s next for Twin Forks? I mean other than the touring, are you still writing songs for this project and do you see making another record?

CC: Yes and yes. You know, when you stumble upon it – the right thing for the band – the songs begin to form an identity. And everyone in this band, they all seem to think that I stumbled onto the template of the identity of the band really early. And so they literally got out of my way, they left me in a room alone and sat in the next room until I said, “Hey, come check this out.” And now I think they really understand the difference between a folk song that’s great and a Twin Forks song that’s great. So I’m really excited to see what [kind of songwriting] Jonathan brings to the table or what the other members of the band bring to the table, but I’ve already begun writing too.

CM: So do you see Twin Forks being your full-time thing for a while, or are you just going to just sort of keep following your inspiration wherever it leads?

CC: I don’t have any indication that my inspiration going to lead anywhere but Twin Forks for the time being. I don’t know that I’ll feel drawn to Dashboard the way I feel drawn to Twin Forks right now. But it would be really unfair to this fanbase that’s been just sort of waiting [for Dashboard] to make a record just so they can have one, as opposed to because I feel called to do it. And that sound’s way loftier than I intended it, but I think you know what I mean. So yeah, Twin Forks is my band. It’s not my side project. It is my band, and it is my band to the degree that I’ve committed myself to it with everything I’ve got.

Twin Forks - Twin Forks

Where’s that next Dashboard Confessional album? Ever since 2009’s Alter the Ending, the band’s Butch Walker-produced, pop-fest of a sixth record, things have been largely silent from the legendary emo-pop project that launched a million AIM away messages more than a decade ago. Not that frontman Chris Carrabba has exactly been taking it easy. In 2011, he was doing an anniversary album tour for his debut record, 2000’s The Swiss Army Romance, and last year, he reconvened his post-hardcore band, Further Seems Forever, for a comeback album called Penny Black. For the most part, however, fans have been left wondering what was next for Carrabba and whether Alter the Ending was, well…the ending for Dashboard Confessional.

Carrabba’s latest musical endeavor, an alt-folk band called Twin Forks, has done little to answer those questions, but is providing a nice enough distraction at the same time. Last fall, the group – Carrabba, the Narrative’s Suzie Zeldin, Bad Books’ Ben Homola, and producer Jonathan Clark - caught eyes and ears when they unleashed a self-titled debut EP for the Twin Forks project. For the most part, the five-song EP was upbeat, kick-drum driven folk, rendered in the same vein as recent records from bands like the Lumineers and the Head and the Heart. Carrabba’s gift for melody was still intact, filtered now through a lens of backcountry roots music and dusty folk textures. The crisp, slick production Walker had brought to Alter the Ending was gone, replaced by a rougher vocal tone for Carrabba, while Dashboard’s growing reliance on sensitive balladry was largely supplanted for raucous, clap-along folk music. It wasn’t a dynamic EP by any means, but it was an enjoyable one, and it had me excited to get my hands on the band’s eventual full-length work.

So imagine my surprise and satisfaction when, in early January, an email showed up in my inbox providing me with a full stream of the as-yet unreleased album - also a self-titled effort - almost a month and a half in advance. Twin Forks the album compares favorably to Twin Forks the EP in every way. Despite the fact that we’ve already heard half of these songs before, Twin Forks manages to provide a completely fresh experience. Where the EP focused largely on the upbeat side of the band – or rather, the side that the band wished to display to live audiences – the LP provides a new sense of pacing, atmosphere, and versatility thanks to a set of some of the finest ballads Carrabba has ever written. Carrabba’s downtempo numbers have been moving in a folky direction for a while, from the stunning title track of 2006’s viciously underrated Dusk and Summer to the last three or four songs from Alter the Ending. Given the opportunity to embrace that style fully, Carrabba unleashes a flurry of heartfelt and earnest songs here, all awash in mandolin, acoustic guitar, and stomp-clap rhythms. From the ballads to the barnstormers, it’s a trip worth taking.

The songs that Twin Forks included on the EP – “Back to You,” “Something We Just Know,” “Cross My Mind,” “Can’t Be Broken,” and “Scraping up the Pieces” – sound even better now than they did last fall. Freed from their truncated and single-minded EP, these songs get a new lease on life. Despite the fact that the recordings haven’t changed a bit from what we’ve already heard, it’s tough to listen to a song like “Can’t Be Broken” – repurposed here as a stirring album opener – and not feel like it’s reached a higher place. Similarly, the kick-stomping “Back to You” – the song that opened the EP – feels somehow even more vibrant here as it flows into the set’s first ballad, “Kiss Me Darling.” While Carrabba’s crystalline, boyish tenor voice is as a lovely as always on the latter, it’s Zeldin who steals the show, using her lone solo verse on the album to melt hearts and make you fall in love with her. A late recruit to the band, Zeldin provides glowing vocal harmonies throughout Twin Forks, but her verse on “Kiss Me Darling” gives us reason to hope that there will be another Twin Forks record – if only to give this talented girl a chance to take the lead on a song or two.

Not that Carrabba’s strong guiding hand can ever be doubted. On the contrary, the legendary scene frontman delivers some of his best vocal performances here, from the earnest pop balladry of “Plans” – about as close as this album gets to “Stolen” – to the dusky summer night chill-out of “Reasoned and Roughened” (“It’s 90 degrees and it ain’t even May,” Carrabba sings on the verse; we should all be so lucky). From top to bottom Twin Forks never lulls or disappoints. It lacks the stratospheric high points that nearly every Dashboard album had (“Screaming Infidelities” from Swiss Army Romance, “The Brilliant Dance” from The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most, the bookends from A Mark, A Mission…, “So Long, So Long” from Dusk and Summer, and “Until Morning” from Alter the Ending) but it makes up for it by being the most consistently solid album that Carrabba has ever been a part of. From the energetic, handclap folk tracks that ended up on the EP to more restrained album cuts like “Danger” and “Done is Done,” Twin Forks lacks a single weak point.

Closing track “Who’s Looking Out” provides a poetic lullaby to a lovely album, and it’s a truly perfect way to conclude the first chapter of Twin Forks. Singing over a gentle acoustic strum, Carrabba delivers one lilting lyric (“I’m a bum working on my last can, wonderin’ where my life ran/Lost it in the wind and didn’t know”) after another (“I’m a shoe hanging on a phone wire, screw sticking in an old tire/I’m something someone lost along the way”). These striking pieces of imagery make us think about all of the debris left broken, decrepit, and forgotten in our path as we move forward, and just as Carrabba was once singing all about broken hearts and best deceptions, he’s now thinking about life from the perspective of someone who is older, wiser, and more in tune with the way time washes things away. It’s a lingering end to the album, recalling similarly sun-dusted odes from his past (“Dusk and Summer,” my personal favorite Carrabba song, comes instantly to mind), but clearly pointing its compass toward a very different destination. With almost five years now separating us from the last Dashboard album, there’s no indication as to what that band’s future holds. However, with albums as comfortable and likable as Twin Forks, there’s simply no reason to mourn Carrabba’s decision to give this new band his full focus for the time being.

Jim Ivins - Late Night Drive EP

Jim Ivins - Late Night Drive EP

Unsigned, 2012

Four stars

Virginia singer/songwriter Jim Ivins has been making the rounds in the music industry for a few years now, both as a solo artist and as the frontman for the Jim Ivins Band. He's opened for the likes of the Ataris, Parachute and the Rocket Summer, draws influence from Jon Foreman and Ryan Adams, and is buddies with scene hero Ace Enders: not a bad list of names to be associated with. His latest work is an EP entitled Late Night Drive, a terrific set of acoustic based songs with topics ranging from growing up, love (both lost and found), heartbreak and death, that will surely become the soundtrack for the night drives it's title suggests. Right from the first moment of the first track, when forcefully strummed guitar chords came cascading out of my speakers, I was reminded of City and Colour's album Sometimes. That record is still probably the saddest album I've ever heard, and from the very outset, Late Night Drive occupies the same territory of strangely comforting melancholia, though Jim Ivins bears less vocal similarity to Dallas Greene than he does to the likes of Chris Carrabba or Ace Enders himself. The opening track, entitled "Love's Like Snow," introduces everything, starting with a single guitar before the entrance of Ivins' soothing, falsetto laden vocals, and it's wintery, moody tone, sets the atmosphere for the album quite well. The exquisite "Riptides," is even better, showcasing some nice guitar work and one of the strongest choruses on the album, while bells accent parts of the song and add to the ambiance nicely.

The title track follows, this time with a synth line to accompany Ivins' strums. "What is it about the night that makes us think about the things we've lost?" Ivins sings on the chorus, with wistful and nostalgic delivery. Music often hits me the hardest on lonely late night drives home, after an evening out with friends or spent at my girlfriend's house: there's something about playing records at full volume, alone in a car on a dark road that makes them ring with clarity and come alive. The songs on Late Night Drive seem to come directly from that place, and that's something that hit me hard right away. There's a strangely meditative, healing power in drives like that, and that theme cuts through every song on this EP. "Twilight," the following track, comes from a very similar place. It's a mostly piano based number with a killer vocal melody and some of Ivins' most heartbreaking lyrics, born from a relationship at it's end. "Fighting with your present because it won't become your past/Memories are for suckers who couldn't make it last," he croons on the song's bridge, bolstered by some well-placed back-up vocals. The sparse acoustic atmosphere works very well for most of these songs, and "Twilight" is terrific as is, but I feel like there's a better song in there that doesn't quite make it's way out in this arrangement. There's potential for a truly epic, bruising build to that song, a crescendo that's not quite possible with this limited instrumentation and production. It's hard to complain about a song this good, but I would be thrilled to see it done in a bigger fashion.

Ivins saves the best for last with "House of Three," a viscerally moving number that serves as an ode to his mother, who passed away last year. The EP feels like a progression, like every musical and personal moment Ivins has had across the previous four songs have built to this one piece of perfection. Ivins gives his most emotional performance on the album, understandably, and it comes across in both his vocal performance and in his guitar playing, especially in the cathartic chorus. "I don't want to have my memories/'Cause I don't need reminding that they're all that's left until eternity," he states on the verse, looking back at a lifetime of glorious moments with a person who departed from his life far too soon. He considers driving away and trying to escape it all, but by the end of the song, he seems resigned to the fact that he's lost something that no number of late night drives could ever heal, and that the pain he is feeling will probably never fully wash away. Ivins is a strong singer and a songwriter, and it shows on every track on this album, but this one is simply in another class. It's probably one of the four or five best songs I've heard all year, and it would be a shame for Ivins not to get the recognition he deserves for it.

Late Night Drive is a solid EP from a promising young singer/songwriter that I will most certainly be following from here on out. He writes relatable songs with heart and talent, and performs them with passionate emotional force. Ivins reminds me, in many ways, of some of my favorite artists ever, artists whose music came alive on the late night drives he sings about here, and although he's not going to make his way into their ranks just yet, his ability to evoke those thoughts in me is nothing to laugh about, nor is the fact that this EP closes with one of the most gorgeously perfect songs I've heard in awhile. I can only hope I hear a lot (or at least a few) more of those from him down the road.

Don't give away the end: My favorite opening and closing tracks

Following a viewing of High Fidelity late last fall (one of my favorite films, thanks to John Cusack's honest and funny portrayal and Bruce Springsteen's brief cameo), I got into a bit of a list making furor. In the film, Rob, Cusack's character, has a tendency to compile everything into top five lists, including, at one point the film, his "top five side-one, track-ones." It got me thinking, for perhaps the hundredth time, about what my favorite opening and closing tracks would be, but I let this list fall by the wayside for a long time, until I actually read High Fidelity and got it going again. Needless to say, it's taken me awhile to sit down and actually write this all out, but the goal remains the same as it was last fall. A great opening track can turn a good album into a classic, a solid set of songs into a personal soundtrack. So many opening tracks have an anthemic quality to them, a mood that just sets the tone for the record so well that it's impossible to imagine it opening any other way. On the other side of things, many artists always save their best song for last, and I think that's the way I will do things when I make a record (someday). There's just something so profoundly emotional about a great album going out on it's highest note: it makes you feel like you can do anything, and maybe more importantly, it makes you want to listen to the entire thing again. Sometimes, an album can feel like it's just been building to the climactic moment of the closing track, and when that moment finally arrives, it's nothing short of cathartic. Whenever I listen to a new album, I always await that closing track: it's what separates the boys from the men, and every single one of my favorite albums goes out with a resounding high note. Keep in mind that this is not science. There are so many classic candidates for both of these lists, and trimming them to five for each was murder (and didn't really happen...), but what remains represents not only my favorite tracks in a (somewhat) narrow category, but some of the greatest songs ever put on record.

Rules:

1. One song per artist, per category. Otherwise Bruce would fairly easily have two in each, and Butch and Jimmy would both stand a fairly good shot at grabbing two of the slots in the album closer section.
2. The album in question has to be at least a year old, and I have to have been listening to it for at least a year as well. You never know what's going to stand the test of time.
3. Intros or outros don't count. A closer is a closer, even if there's an epilogue afterwords (though I will never understand the band who tacks on a lame outro track). Hidden tracks, if they were featured on the actual CD do count, however. Why? Because I want them to.

Openers:

1. Bruce Springsteen - "Thunder Road" from Born to Run (1975)

I don't know how many times I've gone on about how perfect a song and how perfect an opener this masterpiece is, but rest assured, I could go on for much longer. From the chilling piano/harmonica intro to the deeply poetic lyrics (especially the first verse), there's nothing about this song I would change. I'm not sure Bruce has ever sounded better than he does here, and I still get chills when I hear him sing "show a little faith, there's magic in the night." The song just builds and builds, eschewing the normal verse/chorus dynamic of most pop and rock songs, and just flowing in a way that I still can't describe, even after I've listened to it hundreds of times and played it myself on countless occasions. No album has ever opened with a more powerful or inspirational song: it sets the scene for what is to follow, gathering steam as it goes, with Bruce's vocal line getting higher and the band closing in, until it all collapses, in a cascade of piano keys, into Clarence Clemons repeating sax solo. I don't think there could possibly a more fitting introduction to the greatest album of all time.

2. U2 - "Where the Streets Have No Name" from The Joshua Tree (1987)

The opening minutes of this 1987 classic, still one of the greatest albums of all, brought this band from good to great, from a force in the music industry to an icon, and in this track, you'll find every reason for why U2 has been the biggest band on the planet for so many years. When the Edge's unforgettable guitar riff echoes through the intro about a minute in, it's one of the most chilling moments in all of rock music, and the way Bono sings this song is incredible: he sounds hungry, and it's that quality that makes him one of the finest frontmen in rock. The song is at once forcefully inspirational and completely moving, a massive, life-changing kind of rock song that has soundtracked countless personal victories for me over the years. When they played the Super Bowl halftime following September 11th, it was this song that they used to unite those in the stadium (and those watching all around the country), immediately delivering one of the most iconic television performances of all time. And even though Springsteen and Butch will always be my favorite artists and dominate my top live shows list, I don't think I've ever been as excited to hear a song live, or as thoroughly elevated seeing one as I was when U2 finally pulled this song out during the first encore when I saw them last summer. It sat a number one on my "songs I need to see live" list for a solid year, and when I finally witnessed it, it was everything I hoped it would be and more.

3. The Wallflowers - "One Headlight" from Bringing Down The Horse (1996)

"One Headlight" introduced The Wallflowers to the world via the sound of the couple of ringing guitar notes that echoed through the speakers of car radios everywhere in 1996. Next to the harmonica wail that kicks off "Thunder Road," I don't think there's a moment that's ever drawn me into a song, and album, or an artist as fast than the first few seconds of "Headlight" do. But where those notes were merely introducing the world of mainstream music to the presence of Bob Dylan's son (Jakob Dylan, who fronts the band), for me, it was where this whole big, messy, all-consuming obsession with music began. Back in '96 or '97, whenever my older brother got his hands on Bringing Down The Horse, I had him make me a cassette tape copy of it, and "One Headlight" soon became my first ever "favorite song." A decade and a half later, it still wouldn't be far off. Jakob Dylan tackles death and broken hearts, all in a killer five minute pop song, surrounded by a bed of rootsy-rock glory (to this day, I find myself comparing similar bands to the Flowers' performances on this record). I love the song for all of those things: for the lyrics that continue to confound me to this day, for the stellar musicianship on display, but especially for that hook, which never fails to take me back in time.

4.  Bob Dylan - "Like a Rolling Stone" from Highway 61 Revisited (1965)

Rolling Stone called it the greatest song ever written, and there are days when I've felt inclined to agree (though I've probably committed some sort of blasphemy by putting it below his son's song). Springsteen described the song's opening as "the snare shot that sounded like somebody'd kicked open the door to your mind," and the song as a whole shattered the boundaries of the pop song, dragging onto six-minutes, electrifying Dylan's sound, and delivering verse after verse of impossibly good poetry (his best) before exploding into that iconic chorus. "How does it feel? To be on your own? To be without a home?" he asked, over and over, destroying Dylan's folk roots, sending the world of pop music reeling, and bringing rock 'n' roll to a height that Lennon and McCartney (and all who came after them) never reached or matched. It is not my "favorite" song of all time, but objectively, it's almost certainly the greatest.

5. Matthew Ryan - "Return to Me" from Regret Over The Wires (2003)

What can I say about the song that has probably landed itself on more of my mixtapes and playlists than perhaps any other in my collection? This slow burning track, juxtaposing a lurching electronic drum beat with a gentle acoustic swell to create an atmosphere that is both hopeful and relaxing, and Ryan's low, soothing vocals sound rich and warm from beginning to end. In my collection, I don't think there's a single song that I've returned to (no pun intended) for comfort, time and time again, like I have this one. In turns, it's been a lullaby, a soundtrack for thoughtful drives, a farewell to important things in my life, and even a victory anthem, and for that reason, it's become one of the most played songs and best kept secrets in my collection. I love it today as much or more than I did the first time I ever heard it, and while I think it would have worked just as well as a closer as it does an opener, it remains one of my all time favorite songs, and therefore deserves a slot on this list.

6. Chad Perrone - "Blinded" from Wake (2008)

I discovered Chad Perrone two summers ago, on a recommendation from a guy on a message board I frequent. He's an independent artist out of Boston with a knack for writing killer pop hooks, and the perfect voice with which to deliver them. This song was my introduction to his solo material, and I'm honestly not sure if there has been a more perfect pop song written this millennium. The hook feels so effortless, and yet so completely flawless, that it attached itself to my brain on first listen and has yet to let go. And Perrone sings with such emotion and conviction that it's hard to believe that he's a complete unknown. The level of talent on display here, especially in the way he sings the song's massive bridge, is infectious, and I honestly believe that this song could have been a huge hit had it been marketed correctly. It's a shame it wasn't, but as it stands, it's my own personal treasure, a perfect opener to a ridiculously varied set of songs that has quickly risen up my list of favorite albums over the past two years. But even after he took my album AND song of the year titles in 2011 (with his album Release and the song "Under Different Circumstances," respectively), this one perfect song is still him at the peak of his powers, and still manages to blow me away every time I listen to it. If you need an opening track for your summer playlist this year, I don't think there's a better one than this.

Honorable Mentions: The Who - "Baba O' Riley" from Who's Next (1971)

"Baba O' Riley," next to "Born to Run," is probably the biggest anthem in music history. Is there a more satisfying chord progression in music than the one that explodes at the start of this song? Roger Daltrey gives one of the all time great vocal performances, and Pete Townshend's bizarre electronic textures create an atmosphere that is impossible to resist. Few things scream rock 'n' roll as loud as this song's massive, crashing verse sections, subsiding eventually into an Irish, folk-tinged violin solo that carries the song out. For me, it was one of the songs I found myself blasting at maximum volume on my way to my high school graduation. When you listen to this song in that situation, you feel immortal, and the song is immortal because of that. It's so good, in fact, that I've never been able to love Who's Next as much as I would like because it just cannot live up to the impossibly high standard set by this song. 


Counting Crows - "Round Here" from August And Everything After (1993)

Counting Crows are one of those bands that undeniably peaked with their debut album, and it's hard to think of many opening tracks that establish a more immediate impression, not just for an album, but for an entire career, than "Round Here." Legend has it that the recording that ended up on the album was the the only time the song was ever played in that arrangement, so this is a rare case where the live versions of the song (which go on for ten minutes, with singer Adam Duritz singing variations on a melodic line, with a bunch of alternations, extra lyrics, and emotional build thrown in for good measure) are actually the signature versions. If that's the case, then the band stumbled upon something genius when they recorded that take, because the album version is one of the most beautifully understated openers on any album. Duritz is clearly the star here, delivering some of his most poetic lyrics with what is perhaps his best vocal performance today. His delivery is at once yearning and heartbreaking, and the song's arrangement showcases a full range of emotion, building to an incredible climax 3/4 through. The 10 seconds of silence that kick off the record only add the breathtaking intimacy and power of the song when it finally hits.

But how can I have an opener list without at least mentioning Augustana ("Hey Now"), The Beach Boys ("Wouldn't It Be Nice?"), Beck ("The Golden Age"), Black Lab ("Mine Again"), Butch ("The Weight of Her"), Cary Brothers ("Ghost Town"), The Damnwells ("Soundtrack"), Dashboard ("Hands Down" or "The Brilliant Dance"), Bowie ("Five Years"), The Fucking Eagles, Man! ("Hotel Calfornia"), Elton John ("Tiny Dancer"), Fastball ("The Way"), The Gaslight Anthem (a wash between "American Slang" and "Great Expectations"), Goo Goo Dolls ("Big Machine"), any of the Jack's Mannequin openers, most of the Jimmy Eat World ones (especially "Futures"), Lennon ("Imagine"), Jon McLaughlin ("Industry"), Josh Ritter ("Girl in the War"), The Killers ("Jenny Was a Friend of Mine"), Lydia ("This is Twice Now"), any Marvelous 3, Mat Kearney ("All I Have" or "Undeniable"), Matt Nathanson ("Car Crash"), Oasis ("Hello"), Pete Yorn ("Life on a Chain"), Ryan Adams ("New York, New York"), Ryan Bingham ("Southside of Heaven"), Safetysuit ("Someone Like You"), Sister Hazel ("Your Mistake"), either Something Corporate opener, Switchfoot ("Needle in Haystack Life"), Third Eye Blind ("Faster"), Valencia ("Better Be Prepared"), Will Hoge ("Hard to Love"), William Fitzsimmons ("It's Not True"), 1969 ("Why the Suspense"/"Wreck Me"), or extra Springsteen ("Badlands"), U2 ("Sunday Bloody Sunday"), Wallflowers ("Days of Wonder"), Dylan ("Tangled Up In Blue"), Chad Perrone ("OK") and Counting Crows ("Hard Candy").

Closers:

1. Bruce Springsteen - "Jungleland" from Born to Run (1975)

 Just as "Thunder Road" is the flawless introduction to this record, "Jungleland" is the only appropriate closer: an epic, 9 minute and 38 second masterpiece that, at times contends with the opener as my all time favorite song. Springsteen bid farewell to this type of extended, freewheeling narrative song after Born to Run (he'd attempt another on 2009s Working on a Dream, with mixed results), but the last one was by far the greatest, showcasing some of his best lyrics to date. But even as Bruce's characters progress and his words weave themselves into your brain, "Jungleland" thrives most on the strength of the performance of the E-Street Band, which is the best band performance ever committed to tape. Take Roy Bittan's powerful, expressive playing throughout; Danny Federici's explosive organ noise at the song's key moments; Bruce's rousing guitar solo at the halfway point; Max Weinberg's torrential downpour of drums; and then, of course, the granddaddy of all Clarence Clemons sax solos, a two and a half minute outpouring of emotion that has, at many moments, taken my soul to a higher place and brought tears to my eyes. Following his death last summer, I found many entire essays examining the "Jungleland" sax solo: how it saved lives, how Clarence Clemons' playing somehow tells a story of a million words without anyone saying anything at all, how when the solo collapses back into the sound of a broken organ and Springsteen's more broken vocals, we feel as emotionally exhausted as he does. It's arguably the single greatest moment in the history of recorded music, and that, along with Bruce's wordless wails that close the song out, makes "Jungleland" the undisputed BEST closer of any album, all time.

2. Jimmy Eat World - "23" from Futures (2004)

It's almost unfair that Jimmy Eat World have to contend with "Jungleland" here, because each of their albums sports the perfect closer, and most of them (the exceptions being Clarity and possibly Invented) save their best track for last. There have been days since the release of Chase This Light in 2007 where I've thought that "Dizzy" was the best thing the band ever wrote, but ultimately, I always end up coming back to "23." And it makes sense that I do, because Futures might have been the single most pivotal album in my musical evolution. When it came to me in the fall of 2004, it was the first album to show me the huge effect that music could have on me, to show me how an album could become something completely personal, could help me through the hard times, serve as soundtrack for the good ones, and become a part of me. And the best thing about Futures is that, over the seven and a half intervening years, it has never stopped growing and changing with me: I can still listen to it on cold fall nights and feel the same way I did the very first time. And as the sweeping chorus of "23" closes out that titanic record, it reaches through the crashing finale and wraps itself around me, swelling and exploding into one of the most gorgeous finales I have ever heard: one that has never failed to move me. It seems appropriate that Futures ends on its highest note, because it makes the message of the album that much clearer: that there’s no sense in waiting for life to come and find you, because you just have to get up and go after it. It’s a hell of a wild ride, and staring off into the great unknown can be the scariest thing in the world, but when Jim Adkins sings "Don't give away the end/The one thing that stays mine," I can just relax and know that, after all, that's part of the fun.

3. Butch Walker - "Stateline" from Letters (2004)

Here's a somewhat controversial (for lack of a better word) choice, since it's a hidden track rather than the album's proper closer. But like I said, a closer is a closer, and few reach the heights of this one. Butch made what is probably his strangest choice ever in relegating this track to hidden track status, as it is absolutely one of his two or three best songs, and provides a fitting emotional climax to a very emotional record. With little more than his acoustic guitar (and some tasteful reverb effects) to keep him company, Walker delivers one of his rawest and most emotional vocal performances ever, building, much like "Jungleland," to a cathartic wordless wail to finish it out. Walker channels every last ounce of his sadness and pain into the lyric (which depicts a man who never gets to see his kids) until it overwhelms him. As the crashing noise of that wordless bridge subsides, the song fades to silence and the guitar vanishes, making way for Walker's last words: "thinking of you with my last breath." Sung a cappella, the line is one of the most cutting and chilling moments of the record and the perfect encapsulation of the journey the record represents. And just for the record, had my rules been different, had I not allowed myself to choose hidden tracks, Butch would have been in this slot anyway, for the songwriting showcase of a singalong that is "When the Canyons Ruled the City."

4.  "Cigarette Lighter Love Song" from Readysexgo! (2000)

 Here's a stretch, since the Butch Walker-fronted band pretty much served as his personal musical vehicle, but since the artists are technically different, and since this song is simply too good to leave off, here we go. Marvelous 3 fractured and broke up after releasing Readysexgo!, their power-pop-meets-arena-rock masterpiece, which functioned as both a prophetic farewell to fans and a major "fuck you" to Elektra Records, who cut of the band's promotion and left them for dead after a single hit. Butch still plays this one today though, and when he does, he often describes it as "the last song we ever wrote, the last song we ever played as a band, and the last song we ever put on a record." It's not just a finale too a terrific record, it's the coda of the band's entire journey. The way it builds from a hushed piano opening to an explosive, guitar layered bridge (concluding with Walker's shout of "I guess this is the end"), is nothing short of chilling, and over ten years later, the song still stands as one of Walker's very best. For a long time, I thought it was the best song I'd ever heard; when I heard Walker perform it last fall, in an almost completely a cappella arrangement, I thought, for a few minutes at least, that I might have been right.

5. The Dangerous Summer - "Never Feel Alone" from Reach for the Sun (2009)

Reach for the Sun, for me, is an album thoroughly entwined with my final months of high school, my graduation, and the summer that followed: there's not a song on the record that I don't adore, not a single one that doesn't take me back to a moment or a feeling from my past. But every song on the record pales in comparison to "Never Feel Alone," which, even after The Dangerous Summer landed easily on the top of my favorite albums list for last year, will probably always be their definitive composition. By this point, the entire record has passed as a series of intense emotions: of love and loss, hope and fear, regret and nostalgia, happiness and heartbreak, and it all leads, in perfect design, to this crushing finale. "Never Feel Alone" is the purest kind of love song, and it hurts to listen to because it's so honest, so raw and naked. It describes so perfectly that moment in a relationship where you realize you're about to fall in love and let your guard down completely, for better or worse. And the way A.J. Perdomo sings the bridge and final chorus, surrounded by the band's customary wall of guitars, it just rips right through me, because the "better" and "worse" are really there. Because when he sings them, it feels like, even despite all the hardship and tragedy on this record, if he can just have this girl, maybe everything will be okay, like he's laying everything on the line and gambling it on a single possibility. As the Beatles sang, "All you need is love," and this song, with its ideas of falling in love, of giving all of yourself to another person, of finding refuge in that love, is one of the most perfect depictions of a single, distinct moment that I've ever heard, and one of the most beautiful and cathartic album closers I've ever heard.

6. The Killers - "Why Do I Keep Counting?" from Sam's Town (2006)

I've always found it incredibly irritating how Sam's Town, otherwise my favorite Killers album, is hampered somewhat by the way it is framed as a record. The "Enterlude" is strange enough, since it comes after the opening title track and is, as a result, pretty pointless. The "Exitlude," on the other hand, isn't such a bad song, but it does hamper the effectiveness of "Why Do I Keep Counting?" as a finale, and even makes it a questionable inclusion on this list. But there aren't a whole lot of songs that are more climactic or as innately, irrevocably final as this one, nor are there many "closers" that sum up their album's so perfectly. "Why Do I Keep Counting?" also come from a guy (Brandon Flowers) who has closed his other three records with what are arguably their weakest tracks, and is, as a result, all the more magnificent. It's a song that plays like a mini "Jungleland," at the end of a record that is so enthralled in Springsteen's influence that the band's sound is transformed entirely (something that earned the record decidedly mixed reviews back in 2006). But Sam's Town is actually the better record overall than Hot Fuss was, and "Why Do I Keep Counting?" is a climactic masterstroke, building to a bridge so huge and so vocally stratospheric that it wouldn't have been out of place on Born to Run. And while I wish the record really did end with the big drum hits at the end of this song, "Exitlude" ultimately plays like an extension of it.

(one) Honorable Mention: Green Day - "Whatsername" from American Idiot (2004)

There will never come a day when people stop giving Green Day crap: crap for the pop-punk hits they scored in the early 90s, crap for the cultural ubiquity that "Good Riddance" earned as "that one graduation song," and especially crap for American Idiot, which spawned five reasonably successful singles and was termed, in different circles, as sell-out garbage and as a masterpiece. I'd be in the latter group on that one: I will never be able to discount the massive personal importance this record had on my musical evolution back in 2004, and while it hasn't aged as well as a few of the albums I was listening to at the time (Jimmy Eat World's Futures being the obvious pick), it's still a record I still love and revisit fairly often, still spawned some of the absolute finest radio rock singles of the decade, and still has one of the best album closers I've ever heard. Sell out bands don't make records as deep as American Idiot, records where the album tracks trump the singles and where the thematic elements are as important as the musical. "Whatsername" is the realization of everything American Idiot actually is, even if people didn't quite get it at the time: American Idiot got saddled, rather unfortunately, with being the "Bush protest album," released around the time of the 2004 election, but at it's heart, it's Born in the U.S.A. all over again: the politics are there, but they serve as subtext for the story, which is just about friendship and love (and their later disintegration) in a fucked-up modern America. "Whatsername" is the epilogue, a break-up anthem for the ages where the end of a whirlwind relationship also symbolizes the end of youth and innocence for the protagonist, and the realization of the cruelty the world can throw. Years later, I appreciate the album so much more because it's basically a condensation of the arc Springsteen pursued across five or six records, and this song is what makes that so evident. "Forgetting you," Billie Joe Armstrong sings in the song's final moments. "But not the time." Could there be a more apt or honest statement about youth?

The "they don't quite count in the ways I want them to, but are still killer ways to close an album" category

Third Eye Blind - The last three songs on Third Eye Blind (1998)

While a band going out on their highest note is certainly something I appreciate, I could hardly have gone through a post like this without acknowledging the perfectly executed beauty that surrounds the last fifteen minutes of Third Eye Blind's masterful debut album. While much of the album was full of bratty, high energy, tongue in cheek pop rock, the final trinity ("The Background," "Motorcycle Drive-By," and "God of Wine") showed just how deep and hard the band could hit, and all three of those songs rank amongst my personal favorites ("Motorcycle Drive-By" would be in the top ten). These songs explore death, fractured relationships, and every stage of grief, and in doing so, they join to form one of the most powerful and emotionally exhausting conclusions to any record I own. When the band hit it big with "Semi-Charmed Life" (which could be the catchiest pop song of all time), I doubt many listeners expected the band had songs like these three in them. I certainly didn't, and I can't remember actually listening to the full record until about 2004 (though I loved all the singles as a kid). Still, I remember listening to "Motorcycle Drive-By" on some summer evening, and having it hit me right in the gut. Over the next few years, the song would earn a massively personal spot in my heart, but it was just one piece of three, and both "The Background" and "God of Wine" are songs that knock me down and blow me away whenever I listen.

Dashboard Confessional - "Dusk & Summer" and "Heaven Here" from Dusk & Summer (2006)

"Heaven Here," as the proper closer, could have made its way onto the list proper, but I figured by doing that, I would be doing a disservice to the truly impeccable juxtaposition between it and the penultimate title track. I've already written about these songs in regards to the summers they have soundtracked, but I'll say a few bits of it again. That Dusk & Summer ends up being, rather surprisingly, my favorite Dashboard record (and at least two others would stand a good chance of scoring a spot on my all time top 50). But here, in the space of a mere nine minutes, Carrabba captures a single feeling, a single atmosphere, as well as I've ever heard any songwriter do it. It's that feeling I get at the end of every summer, looking back over the season, sitting on the beach with the girl I love as the sun goes down and trying to hold onto the brilliance of summer and of youth, even as it slips through our fingers and out the door. The summer I fell in love for the first time, those two songs immortalized themselves and became a part of who I am: the former played as I realized that I loved this girl, and the latter the next morning, as we said goodbye to each other and began a long distance relationship. Carrabba's voice soars at the climactic moment of "Heaven Here," reaching impossible heights as he sings "Heaven is here, and tonight we are the only ones who feel it." Hearing that song, as I kissed my girlfriend goodbye, as the entire season and our entire romance flashed before my eyes, as tears poured down my face, was the most intensely emotional connection I have ever felt with a person or with a song. In that way, I guess "Heaven Here" should be number 1, but I just wouldn't have felt right listing without the title track, since after all, I couldn't have had one without the other.

I could go on all night listing honorable mentions for closing tracks. More often than not, the closer ends up being the peak of the album (or at least one of them), and there are so many songs that could have made it onto this list easily. Springsteen has more great closers than I could ever have fit on here, even if I had allowed for more than one per artist. "Darkness on the Edge of Town," all of side two from The Wild, The Innocent ("Incident," "Rosalita," and "New York City Serenade" could have easily made it into that last category), "Valentines Day," or certainly "My City of Ruins." As I said, every Jimmy album sports a great closer, same for Butch (including the Marvelous 3 material). I love closers that reprise bits and pieces of their albums' earlier songs, like Chad Perrone's "Keep Us Around" (all of his closers are incredible, including "Goodnight, Goodbye" from his old band Averi), or Valencia's "Free," and could have easily swapped them in for that fifth slot. And even then there's Will Hoge ("This Highway's Home"), The Gaslight Anthem ("The Backseat"), Anberlin ("*Fin"), Arcade Fire ("Sprawl II"), The Beatles ("A Day in the Life," the Abbey Road Medley, "Twist & Shout"), Ben Folds ("The Luckiest"), Billy Joel ("Everybody Has A Dream" OR "Miami 2017"), Black Lab ("Circus Lights"), Bloc Party ("Ion Square"), Bon Iver ("Re-Stacks"), Counting Crows ("Walkaways," "A Murder of One"), David Bowie ("Rock 'n' Roll Suicide") Death Cab For Cutie ("A Lack of Color"), Doves ("Caught by the River"), Fastball ("Whatever Gets You On"), The Format ("If Work Permits"), Guster ("Parachute"), Idlewild ("In Remote Pt. 1/Scottish Fiction"), ANY of the Iron & Wine closers, The Injured List ("Wait"), Jack's Mannequin ("Into The Airwaves" or "Caves"), Jesse Malin ("Aftermath"), Lifehouse ("Everything"), Matchbox Twenty ("The Difference"), Michael McDermott ("Carry Your Cross"), Motion City Soundtrack ("Hold Me Down" OR "Even If It Kills Me"), The New Frontiers ("Who Will Give Us Love?"), Oasis ("Champagne Supernova"), Peter Gabriel (the iconic "In Your Eyes," thanks to ANOTHER John Cusack movie), Radford ("How Does It Feel"), Ryan Bingham ("For What It's Worth"), Safetysuit ("Life Left To Go"), Something Corporate ("Miss America"), more Third Eye Blind ("Good Man") Van Morrison ("Slim Slow Slider"), The Who ("Won't Get Fooled Again") and Yellowcard ("Back Home").

Even with that exhaustive list, I'm certain I've missed more than a few of my favorites, and if you asked me the same question next week, any of the above could jump up even higher in the conversation. This list was also made, in accordance with rule number two, by completely ignoring 2011, which took more than a few terrific songs out of the conversation on both sides. Ultimately though, these songs represent some of the greatest, most emotionally moving, and most lasting music in the world, at least to me, and really, what else even matters?

"Days like that should last and last..."

The summer of 2006, for all intents and purposes, was one of the most glorious of my entire life. I was 15 years old, I didn’t have a care in the world and I’d just escaped from my one single torturous year at the local junior high school. I felt like I’d been on autopilot for a year: my classes were ridiculously easy and viciously boring, my teachers didn’t seem to give a shit and I was moving through the most awkward stage of adolescence, where basically all my classmates were about as far from cool as they could possibly get, but didn’t seem to get the joke. I was running track and cross country, trying to follow in my brothers footsteps, but the training became so mundane that I almost immediately realized that wasn’t the path I wanted to take. I was trying to figure out who I was, but I was in the absolute worst and most confusing environment for doing so. The truth was, I’d never minded school before that year. I’d attended a small charter school for 8 years and had learned so much there that when I came to the public school, it felt like I was going backwards. I could write better than just about everyone in my year, I was re-doing math that I’d already taken and I’d already done roughly half of the stuff we studied in biology as well. Bored out of my mind, I turned to music as my only refuge, becoming passionate about singing and still listening, over and over again, to every album I could afford to buy.

By the time the year was out, I needed a summer vacation more than I’d ever needed one in my life. That school had, in one year, made me loathe the idea of public education, and a break was a necessity. Luckily, that summer was just the break I needed: a lot of rest, a lot of fun with family, and a slew of what remain some of my favorite summer records of all time. Dashboard Confessional's Dusk & Summer was one of those. For the 15 year old version of me, the title track might have been one of the greatest songs ever written. This album gets written off all the time by fans, but for my money, it might be the best thing Carrabba has ever done, because the highlights of this record (the title track and closer "Heaven Here", most notably) do as good a job of capturing a specific moment and a specific feeling as just about any I’ve ever heard.

"Dusk & Summer" is the perfect end-of-summer ballad, a slice of acoustic perfection that sounds like how the world looks in the moments right after the sun goes down on a beautiful August night. It sounds like the final nights of a perfect summer and that feeling you get when you watch the sun go down one last time, trying to hold onto the glorious season, even as it slips through your fingers and out the door. Truthfully, it’s a pretty simple break-up ballad: looking back on a relationship that ended with the summer, and wishing you could change things, but knowing you never can, but Carrabba expresses so much more than that with his softly strummed guitar and his emotional, wavering vocals. It’s about growing up, it’s about the passage of time and about love found and lost. It’s about having to say goodbye to your hometown and to the people you love at the end of a great summer, and it’s about wondering just how that summer flew by so fast. All of that hit me when I listened to this song one late night towards the end of that summer. I wanted it to last forever, to bask in the heartbreaking beauty of that song and to just live on like this for countless long, beautiful days and warm nights, but instead, the summer had flown by twice as fast as any other part of the year. Truth is, they always do.

Ever since that year, even as I’ve grown up and changed, even as friends have come and gone, that song has stayed with me like few others have. Every year on the last night of the summer, I play that song, and every year, it makes me tear up a bit. I can hardly believe it’s been five years since it first came into my life, but every time I listen, I can still hear bits of each of those summers in the bars of that song: a perfect family vacation to Palisades in 2006, running on the golf course after sundown in 2007, late night drives home from friends houses in my first car in 2008, bidding farewell to Northern Michigan as a high school graduate in 2009, kissing my girlfriend goodbye in 2010 and realizing I was in love with her, and going on one last summer walk with her in 2011, watching the sun go down and seeing the entire season flash before my eyes. That song is all of those things and more, but when I hear those first chords, strummed softly on Chris Carrabba’s guitar, the first thing I see is the way this place looked in 2006, when I fell in love with summer in a big, big way.

"You're the song I wrote that I will always love"

The Dangerous Summer -War Paint
Hopeless Records, 2011
Five stars

Two years ago, when The Dangerous Summer landed on my radar with the release of Reach For the Sun, I was checking out the record based on one great review of it, without hearing a single track and lacking any knowledge of this band's background. The band turned out to be the best discovery I made that year (and I made many), and over the course of that spring and summer, that record got to me in ways that only a few albums ever had before and maybe only 2 or 3 have since. It found me in an interesting place in my life: I was about to graduate from high school, had just received my acceptance letter into my college's music program, after a solid month on the waiting list, and I didn't have more than a faint idea of what I wanted to do with my life. Reach For the Sun came into my life and became my soundtrack: all of my uncertainty, all of the bittersweet feelings I had about graduating, and then later about leaving behind the only town I'd ever known, seemed to be staring back at me just under the surface of The Dangerous Summer's emotional vocals, heartfelt lyrics and their wall of guitars. There were songs I felt I might have written myself, songs that flawlessly described the way I was feeling, or songs that spoke of experiences like ones I had faced over the past few years. I took those songs, filled them with my own experiences, and they became immortal to me. It would quickly lead that album into my top 25 of all time.

Two years later, they're back with a sophomore record that makes me feel almost the same way, an album that is every bit as good as it's predecessor (or even a little bit better) that has become the soundtrack to my summer and unquestionably my album of the year thus far. War Paint picks off where Reach left off. Make no mistake, this isn't a departure: most of these songs would have fit comfortably on the last album (a record which wasn't notable for it's sonic variation anyway). That's not to say that all the songs sound similar, but they could easily blend together on first listen or for someone not already used to the band's songwriting style. The key to the record is frontman A.J. Perdomo, with his earnest lyrics and fiercely emotional vocal delivery (what he lacks in technical skill, he makes up for in conviction). The guitar sound on this record is massive, and though the constant presence of the instrument may be tiring for some listeners, Perdomo's songwriting is simply too good to ignore.

I could go through this album, describing bits of each song and quoting lyrics, but those things couldn't possibly express the way I feel about this album. The Dangerous Summer, more than perhaps any other artists I know, more than Butch Walker, more than Bruce, more than Jimmy Eat World, appeal directly to my emotions. When I hear A.J. Perdomo sing songs like "No One's Gonna Need You More" or "Siren" I can't help but be drawn in. And when he sings the bridges of those songs, the part of a song that seems to be his songwriting specialty, I can't help but get a little bit choked up. This isn't a record I can go through and speak at length about every single musical nuance, because honestly, there aren't many. The instrumentation is basic: guitar, bass, drums and vocals, the chord progressions pretty standard. A detractor could easily find a lot to complain about on this record, and yet, when I hit play, I can't help but be completely captured by what is coming through my speakers. There hasn't been a record this year that has been able to involve me so thoroughly. Whenever I play a track, I can't resist listening to the rest of the album from that point. And I always sing along to every word.

For as far back as I've been in love with music, a band or an album has defined my summers: 2004 belonged to the Counting Crows and Hard Candy. 2005 was ruled by Butch Walker, as was 2006, though he was joined there by Dashboard Confessional with Dusk and Summer and Jack's Mannequin with Everything in Transit. 2007 was all about Black Lab and Moses Mayfield, 2008 encapsulated by Safetysuit's Life Left to Go, 2009 by Reach For the Sun and Mat Kearney's City of Black and White, and 2010 had a varied soundtrack dominated the most by Chad Perrone.

War Paint will be the album that will always take me back in time to summer 2011: that night in mid spring when I first heard an unmastered version of the dark "Work in Progress." Rushing home to download the record the night it leaked and hearing the opening bars of the title track cascade out of my speakers. And plenty of early Sunday evenings or late weeknights, driving home with the album playing at full volume, singing along with every song at the top of my lungs and marveling at the beauty of this town, at the gorgeous night skies or the breathtaking sight of the evening sun sparkling on the water. All the time I spent with my girlfriend and her family or with mine, all the nights performing at my local dinner theater and just loving my life and all the people in it, always wishing this season could last forever, will at least be forever preserved in these songs: in the retro guitar intro of "I Should Leave Right Now," in the shattering bridge of "Miscommunication," or in the massive chorus of "Everyone Left" and the emotional release that comes during the climactic moments of "In My Room."

"Waves" is the album's closer, and I can't really imagine a better finale to my own near-perfect summer than that. When I hear that song, the entire season, from the day I left school until today, flashes before my eyes. I see the sun-drenched beach where I spent so much of my time, and for a moment, I can almost feel what it was like to be there, but then the song is over far too soon, and it's gone. And then it strikes me just how quickly this summer flew past: it seems like it was only yesterday when I took a twilight walk around campus on the first (and one of the only) gorgeous days of last spring and felt like I could almost taste the summer, like it was finally within my grasp after what had been a truly awful semester. Now, here I am, with less than a week left in my hometown and wishing with all my heart that I could go back.

But as A.J. sings in War Paint's final song, "I'll take my time and move on from all of this, it's all about the rolling waves." No matter what happens, no matter where life takes me from here, I think I really am ready to face it, it's just always so hard to say goodbye to something that feels completely safe and friendly. It's times like these where albums like War Paint come to mean the most to me, and I can guarantee this is a record I'll be listening to for the rest of my life. The best album of the year, the best album I've heard so far this decade, and probably the first new album that will join my all time top ten since Butch Walker dropped Sycamore Meadows in 2008, War Paint is a masterpiece, and means more to me than I think I'll ever be able to express to anyone. It doesn't matter to me that it isn't going to show up on end-of-the-year lists for the likes of Pitchfork or Rolling Stone, and I don't care that the vast majority of the people I know will never have any idea who The Dangerous Summer are. I don't need anyone else to tell me this album is something special: my heart's already done that for me.