The Fray Bring the Nostalgia With Dashboard Confessional & Colony House
Saturday night’s sky above SDSU looked like it was in on the joke. Clear, warm, with just enough of a coastal breeze to remind you that you’re in one of the better cities on earth to watch live music outdoors. The Summer of Light Tour couldn’t have asked for a better setting, and the three acts who filled that stage made the most of every single minute of it.
The evening opened with Colony House, a band whose story almost writes itself. Caleb and Will Chapman, the brothers at the center of the group, grew up as the sons of multi-platinum contemporary Christian artist Steven Curtis Chapman in Franklin, Tennessee. That pedigree could have pigeonholed them into a particular lane, but Colony House has spent over a decade building something entirely their own. The band, which also includes guitarist Scott Mills and bassist Parke Cottrell, named themselves after an apartment complex in downtown Franklin where the members had lived at various points. Their self-described sound is “landlocked surf rock,” a tag that sounds like a joke until you actually hear it, at which point it makes complete sense.
Caleb Chapman prowled the stage with a kind of coiled, restless energy, the sort of frontman who makes you feel like he’d be performing this hard in a parking lot with five people watching. The lead single from their 2014 debut, “Silhouettes,” held the top spot on SiriusXM Alt Nation for four months when it came out, and hearing it under the open sky at SDSU, it still sounds like a song with something urgent to say. Their “You Know It,” from 2017, was a viral moment years before it charted, eventually racking up over 75 million streams on the strength of nothing but word of mouth and the fact that it’s genuinely impossible to resist.
If Colony House got the crowd warmed up, Dashboard Confessional turned the temperature up entirely. Chris Carrabba became the defining face of a generation of emo fans in the early 2000s, having left his previous band, the post-hardcore outfit Further Seems Forever, to pursue something more personal: vulnerable, introspective songwriting with an acoustic guitar at its center. He named the project Dashboard Confessional after a lyric from one of his earliest songs, and began releasing material in 2000.
Saturday night, Carrabba walked out with an acoustic guitar and immediately had 10,000 people in the palm of his hand. There’s a particular magic to watching an audience that spans multiple decades all mouth the same words in unison, and Dashboard Confessional consistently produces that feeling. When “Hands Down” hit, you could feel the shift in the air. It wasn’t nostalgia exactly, it was more like recognition, the particular pleasure of a song that holds up completely and knows it. Carrabba played it like he meant it in 2001 and still means it now. He kind of did both of those things at once, which is its own form of artistry. By the time he finished, the crowd wasn’t ready to let him leave, which is precisely the condition you want an audience in before the headliner takes over.
The Fray returned in 2024 after a decade-long hiatus, and Saturday’s show was part of the Summer of Light Tour, supporting their first new full-length release in years, “A Light That Waits.” The band’s current lineup is led by co-founder Joe King on vocals, alongside lead guitarist Dave Welsh and drummer Ben Wysocki, and right from the opener, it was clear these are three musicians who remember exactly how to do this.
Their breakthrough single “How to Save a Life” is now RIAA Diamond-certified and spent 58 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, which means that in any room of several thousand people, a significant portion of them have a personal history with that song. The Fray played into that weight without ever leaning on it lazily. They sequenced the night thoughtfully, spreading the big catalog moments across a set that also gave genuine, sustained attention to new material. Songs from “A Light That Waits” held their own next to “You Found Me” and “Over My Head (Cable Car)” rather than being treated as the obligatory stretch before the hits return. That’s harder to pull off than most bands make it look.
King was in fine voice throughout, delivering the kind of performances that remind you the piano-driven alt-rock The Fray helped define in the mid-2000s was a special moment in time. Welsh’s guitar work added weight and texture without ever muscling out the emotional clarity at the center of every song. And the band gave the outdoor setting its due, letting the bigger moments open up into the night air rather than compressing everything into arena-sized bombast.
When “How to Save a Life” finally arrived, the whole amphitheater became one voice. That’s the moment any Fray fan shows up hoping to get, and it delivered completely, the kind of collective singalong that makes outdoor concerts worth the traffic home. They ran through over an hour and a half of material and still left the crowd wanting more, which is exactly the right place to end.
The Summer of Light Tour is, in three words, worth every penny. If this lineup is headed to a city near you, do not overthink it
