Close to a decade now, Dashboard Confessional has cultivated the kind of connection with fans that most songwriters spend a lifetime pursuing. Since the release of Swiss Army Romance in 2000, Carrabba’s fearless honesty has inspired fierce loyalty from anyone seeking truth in music. You cannot fake the truth. You can’t even hide from it. So the best songwriters dive deeply into it, coming out the other side armed with sing-a-long anthems.

Carrabba’s sixth full-length album as the mind behind Dashboard Confessional, Alter the Ending is a collection of songs that speak to the desire in all of us to bend the shape of our lives, to twist fate, to change the end before we arrive at it. For Carrabba, this new album is the hard-won remedy for the rough spells that can plague any life, his being no exception.

From the first notes of album opener “Get Me Right,” Carrabba sings of a struggle to get home, through a dense forest, to a rundown, broken old place. As the music moves from its first sparse, cautious notes, the song grows taller and larger and until it finally sounds like the very salvation its narrator is seeking. On the first single, “Belle of the Boulevard,” Carrabba sings, “Down in a local bar/Out on the Boulevard/The sound of an old guitar/Is saving you from sinking...” To be saved by music is not a fairy tale. For Carrabba, it’s a very real aspiration, maybe even a work ethic. In fact, Alter the Ending might be the most confident, optimistic music in Dashboard Confessional’s entire storied career up to now. It’s the sound of Chris Carrabba finally finding in his own music what everyone else heard from the very beginning, turning this “little side-project” into a decade-long triumph of empathy and truth.