[Dixielandjazz] Audience Involvement via sing-a-longs.

[Steve Barbone]

Now here's a guy who merely sings songs that the audience knows and they
sing along with him. Seems to work as about 21,000 fans came to do just that
at Madison Square Garden in NYC. The article was accompanied by a  picture
of the singer and singing fans, captioned below:

"All together now: Fans sing along with Christopher Carrabba at Madison
Square Garden on Friday."

Perhaps the time is right for a re-examination of the "Shakey's" concept?

Has anybody on the list heard this young man? Apparently not all "music" is
rap and hip-hop, as some would have us believe, among the young.

Cheers,
Steve Barbone 

Love Songs Sung by a Heartthrob (and Fans) Rock the Garden

NY TIMES - By KELEFA SANNEH - December 11, 2006

³Do you feel like singing along a little bit?² Christopher Carrabba really
wanted to know. Or he really wanted the fans to think he really wanted to
know. Or he really wanted to remind the fans that he knew that they really
wanted him to really want to know.

Mr. Carrabba was playing a glorious sold-out concert at Madison Square
Garden on Friday night with his band, Dashboard Confessional. He sang 14
songs, accompanied at all times by thousands of (mainly) teenage voices.
Surely every concert has an element of ritual, but a Dashboard Confessional
concert is a ritual first and foremost. You pay your money hoping not for
new songs or new arrangements, but for old ones and for a chance to drown
out the singer.

Long before a sold-out Madison Square Garden concert seemed possible,
Dashboard Confessional was merely a side project; Mr. Carrabba¹s main job
was leading Further Seems Forever, a Christian punk band from Florida. But
it turned out Mr. Carrabba had a knack for strummed love songs, and the
increasing popularity of Dashboard Confessional eventually turned him into
emo¹s first real rock star. His 2003 album, ³A Mark, a Mission, a Brand, a
Scar,² has sold more than 800,000 copies.

In June he released the follow-up, ³Dusk and Summer² (Vagrant/Interscope),
which sounds bigger and tamer: it includes 10 sturdy rock songs, and it is
both less histrionic and less charming than his earlier albums. Compared
with the flamboyant kids who rule emo right now, Mr. Carrabba, 31, seems
like a sensible elder statesman.

But when it comes to putting on a big rock show, he has only gotten better.
Although he occasionally picked up an acoustic guitar, he played most of the
concert with an electric guitar, or with nothing but a microphone, while his
band worked to inflate the songs to U2-ish proportions. (Dashboard
Confessional has toured with U2, and that band¹s longtime producer, Daniel
Lanois, worked with Mr. Carrabba on some of the new music.) The set included
the best songs from the new album, along with the band¹s current single,
³Stolen,² which revolves around a refrain that might embarrass a more
embarrassable heartthrob: ³You have stolen my heart.² . . . snip to

The only thing wrong with Mr. Carrabba¹s streamlined set was its brevity.
Some fan favorites, like ³The Best Deceptions,² were missing. But although
he updated ³The Places You Have Come to Fear the Most² with lyrics from
another emo band, Say Anything, the main thrill of Friday¹s concert was
hearing how well his best songs have held up. He ended with ³Hands Down,²
which first appeared on a 2002 ³MTV Unplugged² album. And some fans were
still singing the lyrics as they filed out of the building: ³My hopes are so
high that your kiss might kill me/So won¹t you kill me?/So I die happy.² Emo
stars get old, but full-throated songs about first kisses and last kisses
have a way of sticking around.