Jon Caramanica, writing for The New York Times:

Yes, and it wasn’t. If you were to have been my accountant at that time, you would say there might never be a better time than right this minute to release a record, but it just doesn’t work for me that way. So the waiting game began. We did our tour and a year passed. I wrote, like, snippets and then I would stop. I’d physically stop. I put the pencil and the paper down and said, “Stop it. You’re just eager, you’re eager to deliver.”

Then one day off tour I woke up one morning and I walked downstairs and I wrote a song, and it was evident from the first melodic idea that this was a Dashboard song. And the next morning I woke up and I bolted for my guitar. I realized, “I’m there.” After all that time I’d begun to wonder if they’d ever come back, and when they came back they came back in rapid succession. The whole thing was a cavalcade and I just surrendered to it.

This is a really well done and informative interview. I’ve been spinning the new album for a few weeks now, and there’s some really good classic Dashboard Confessional songs on it (and a few I’m not sold on), but man, I will go do my grave thinking Alter the Ending was criminally underrated.

Chris Carrabba talked with Billboard about the upcoming Dashboard Confessional album:

“It’s probably not savvy to say this, but I’ve begun to admit that I like my older records better — and I know why,” he explains. “As time went on, people came along with good and different ideas, and one thing I kept hearing a lot is that lyrics don’t matter — and I think I’m not the right guy to say that to. They might be completely right, but that’s why I write songs. So this (upcoming) record, to me, is very much like the first three and a half records, where it’s just like — I have something to say, not just a nice thing to sing.”