“I knew that I wanted to do something different from Dashboard for quite a while. I didn’t know I wanted to do this, but the band itself is my endeavor to do something completely different.”
Initially, from the outside, Chris Carrabba’s move from fronting one of alt-rock’s pioneering outfits Dashboard Confessional to starting afresh with the alt-folk style of his newest band Twin Forks might appear to be a bit startling.
However, he describes it as a fluid transition that was a back-to-basics move of sorts, triggered by asking himself questions that he was subconsciously putting off for quite some time.
“It took a helping hand from a friend or two to guide me back to my earliest influences.
“I remember sitting down with Jonathan, who’s the bass player in Twin Forks, and he said to me, ‘Why have you been avoiding your favourite music?’ and I kind of looked at him with my head cocked to the side. I had no idea why, and I really had to think about it.”
Upon reflection, Carrabba admits that in Dashboard he fell into the habit of making “a conscious decision to be very careful not to let any of [his] earliest influences show”.
The post-punk sound he wrote was a product of his hardcore tastes at the time, rather to the style of music that he had grown up listening to.
“I think with all my bands, I worked in reverse order of my influences. Fast-forward now, or rewind, I guess, to Twin Forks and it’s closer to finally breaking the things I listened to when I was very young to now, really.
“All of my friends who sit around and watch the basketball game with me while I have a guitar in my hand know that’s just kind of all I play when I’m left to my own devices. I just pick up a guitar and I’ll play bluegrass or folk music; it’s just where my fingers go when I’m not really thinking about where to take them.”
“…he said to me, ‘Why have you been avoiding your favourite music?’ and I kind of looked at him with my head cocked to the side.”In that sense, Twin Forks seems to mark a time in Carrabba’s long-spanning career where he has reached a new plateau. Now, he’s exploring the kind of music that occurs completely naturally to him.
“Enough time has passed now that I think I can work within the parameters of my earliest influences and still have room to push at the edges.”
It’s a clean slate for the 38-year-old, and as he talks through the phone line with an infectiously energetic tone, it sounds like he is adoring every second of it.
Having been hit with the inspiration to go back to his roots, it was then a matter of consolidating this blueprint for a new musical direction by building the new project from the ground up.
“I knew I wanted to do something different from Dashboard, so the first thing I did was I spent so long learning how to Travis pick and realised I’d never done that on any of my records.
“Since I knew I didn’t do that in Dashboard, I thought that’d be it – that’d be the defining factor for how I’d take my first post-Dashboard step,” he says of the birth of Twin Fork’s acoustic stylings (“this very delicate sound, something I would say close to Nick Drake or early Iron & Wine”).
The initial Twins Forks trio then came together when Carrabba approached drummer Ben Homola backstage at The Troubadour in California, and then producer Jonathan Clark, who both immediately agreed to jump onboard for the new project.
For a while, the three would simply view their collaboration as a side project as opposed to a band.
“It’s such a strange thing with a band like Twin Forks because we’re all in other projects – John’s a successful producer, Ben’s in 150 bands – so we just kept saying to each other that we’re not a band [and that] we just really enjoyed playing together.”
However, that would inevitably change when the trio performed live for the first time at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco, thanks to an invitation from Carrabba’s old friend, Dawn Holliday.
In the musician’s words, this inaugural live show was a “eureka moment” that would go on to set Twin Forks’ future in stone.
“We walked on stage and we reminded each other ‘we’re not a band, so let’s enjoy this because we won’t get to do this often’. But then we walked off stage, we looked at each other and said ‘we’re a band’.
“It’s funny – I think Dawn knew I was going to find what I was looking for before I knew I was looking for it; I thought I found it already.”
From that performance, Carrabba recruited vocalist and keyboardist Suzie Zeldin and the four quickly rode the momentum to release their debut album – which brings us to now.
The finished self-titled record, as we described in our glowing review, is “a collection of enchanting folk tales that lifts the spirits” and inspires the listener to “forget about everything else and live in the now”.
Carrabba says that his songwriting is always “as an extension of who [he is] at any given time”. So, where is he right now?
“I’m at this incredibly liberating place I got to thanks to my friends, one who posed the simple question of, ‘Why do you avoid the thing you love most?’”
“I knew I wanted to do something different from Dashboard”Listening to the Twin Forks record, and getting swept up in its utterly joyous reverie, the vocalist has been able to answer that question and adjust his behaviour accordingly.
Now, as he talks from a break in rehearsal for one of their shows at South By South West, the artist’s excitement about touring the new album across the world is palpable.
While the four-piece only just recently completed their Australian tour as the support act for fellow alt-acoustic dabblers City And Colour, the band are already planning their second endeavor on our soil.
“We have concrete plans to be there; we have no concrete dates on which to be there yet,” Carrabba says with itching excitement, and as he retells stories from his last trip to our country, it’s clear he truly can’t wait to come back.
“Australia has been really, really good to us – even to the degree on this last tour [with City And Colour]. Sure we were just an opener on this phenomenal package of bands, but we also ended up doing a last minute house party near Perth where there was a proposal and everything and it was craziness.
“We’ve just had such unlikely experiences, picturesque memories, and made friends for life every time we come to Australia.
“We’ve already dedicated ourselves to making Australia a place that we go to, even if we never break there it’s just really good for us to be there.”
Of course, you can’t have a conversation with the frontman without asking him about the possibilities of a Dashboard Confessional reunion. Much to the delight of the allegiance of fans he’s accumulated across his long-spanning career, it’s a question he responds to positively with utmost enthusiasm.
“Oh yeah, of course. While [Twin Forks] is the band that I’m passionate about right now, I love Dashboard. That’s family,” the posterboy chirps.
“I have no plans to do Dashboard at the moment, but I’ve never had a plan to not do Dashboard,” he says cheekily.
It seems like a pretty good time to be Chris Carrabba, and an even better time to be one of his fans. That horizon is starting to look pretty busy, and pretty bright.
Twin Forks’ debut self-titled album is out now via iTunes
Listen to ‘Back To You’ by Twin Forks here:
