As the release of their new studio album ('All The Truth That I Can Tell') nears, American rockers Dashboard Confessional have dropped the poignant, sensitive single 'Burning Heart'.
Four years removed from their previous record (2018's 'Crooked Shadows'), 'Burning Heart' was written in a green room in Manchester the middle of 2018 and then performed on stage an hour later."In the song, there’s this sense of 'okay, here we go! Are you ready? Because it's starting,'" frontman Chris Carrabba says.
"This was the first one I wrote for the new album and it's the one outlier of the bunch. That night [in 2018], I wrote a song that I was so certain of. Not that it was just good, but that it was powerful in some way, too.
"The conceit of this song reflects the fact that I'm holding in a lot. I have a lot to say to the person I love in this moment. The idea in this setting is that I'm here to fight for this.
"I wanted a song that took a look at a hard conversation with a sense of although things aren't right now, they may be able to be set right if it's needed badly enough, wanted badly enough.
"In this setting, the conceit of the song is between two people in a relationship – well, you only hear one side. That's the bigger part of the conceit: what if you only heard the one side of the conversation?"
A record that was mostly written prior to COVID landing, Carrabba found himself at a crossroads of sorts as the last decade came to a close, the artist's creative pursuits seemingly running off the smell of an oily rag.
But he waited for the songs to arrive and eventually they did; even a near-fatal motorcycle accident in 2020 wasn't going to stop the momentum and Dashboard Confessional's first record in four years, 'All The Truth That I Can Tell', started coming to life.
"Honesty was at the heart of the writing process, at the heart of the recording process and at the heart of this collection of songs," Carrabba says.
"I had the rare opportunity to be unflinchingly honest, but I think I would have thought in the early days that that would be commonplace.
"Now, I realise it's some kind of cycle within your life and there's great personal reward in accepting that."
'All The Truth That I Can Tell' will be released 25 February. Pre-order it.
'All The Truth That I Can Tell' Tracklisting
1. Burning Heart2. Everyone Else Is Just Noise
3. Here's To Moving On
4. The Better Of Me
5. Southbound And Sinking
6. Sleep In
7. Me And Mine
8. Sunshine State
9. Pain Free In Three Chords
10. Young
11. All The Truth That I Can Tell
