Dashboard Confessional would've had a new album out by now if it wasn't for Chris Carrabba's hard drive getting wiped clean by accident . He tells Spinner how he took it as a sign to start fresh:

"What happened was maybe a year and a half ago I had essentially a whole Dashboard album done and recorded, or demoed out at least. I had this problem in my studio and I lost all the drives of all the music I had ever made.

They weren't backing up correctly so the studio manager, or assistant, was trying to rewrite the macro so that when it was saved to one it overwrote previous backups of sessions, just on this one session we were working on, but somehow all the drives that were linked got wiped during this process and unfortunately I had brought in a drive that contained most of the stuff I had done in the past and the album I was working on.

So I took that as a sign. I probably would have been here with you talking about the record I had put out a year ago if that hadn't happened. But it really made me take a long hard look at what I was looking for as a writer now. And the simple answer was I didn't want to record those songs again, which was alarming to me. If the songs were that good I would have demanded to myself that I go record them again. I was upset about that record being gone, and more upset about the other records being gone, but I was more like, "if I'm not losing my mind to record them again maybe they weren't the right songs."

In that sense it was probably fortunate because maybe I wouldn't have come to that conclusion and I would have been down a different path now. I think I'm writing better music now that's more meaningful to me, that I'm more connected to personally. If I had to look at the arc of my records that's what I like more about certain moments: the ones I can tell that I was so personally connected to. I can kind of tell through hindsight that I'm still connected to those songs all those years and performances later. You'd think the repetition would have stolen my connection, that doing the same thing over and over again would have sapped my joy, but it hasn't. So if I'm honest about the latter records, there were less moments of that than there were with the first two-thirds of my career as a recording artist."

*Watch Dashboard Confessional's Radio 104.5 Studio Session HERE.