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>> EMO ORIGINAL CHRIS CONLEY TALKS ABOUT CONFRONTING HIS INNER DARKNESS AND REEMERGING SAVES THE DAY SINGER GIVES TIPS ON SURVIVAL

April 24, 2008 12:15 am

BY RYAN BROSMER

FOR THE FREE LANCE-STAR

Most bands start out young, playing in high school and hoping for their dream to be realized. For Saves The Day, the dream came true before they even graduated.

While on a tour that will bring the band to the NorVa in Norfolk on Tuesday and Rams Head Live in Baltimore on Wednesday, Saves The Day frontman Chris Conley recently took the time for a phone interview to discuss his band's long history--dating back to 1997--and how he's survived.

"We started in Princeton, N.J., and we were just like a bunch of friends from high school," Conley said. "And then we got signed to Equal Vision [Records]."

Saves The Day released its first two albums on Equal Vision. "Can't Slow Down" was recorded over the band's winter break during their senior year of high school. After releasing their second album, "Through Being Cool," the band was picked up by Vagrant Records, and things began to click.

"We happened to sign with Vagrant at a great time," Conley said. "They were acquiring the Get Up Kids and Alkaline Trio and Dashboard Confessional, and they sort of became a part of this 'emo' culture."

With the 2001 release of "Stay What You Are" on Vagrant, the band began to see commercial success that led to attention from MTV and big-time tours, including opening for Green Day and Blink-182 on the Pop Disaster Tour. Their success grabbed the attention of major labels, and Saves The Day eventually signed on with Dreamworks.

"Being on Dreamworks was a letdown and a learning experience," Conley said. "The corporate infrastructure of a record label is not conducive to producing quality music That was difficult, and they dropped us because the album they purchased from Vagrant didn't do well."

After the Dreamworks debacle, Conley decided it was time to go independent again, and the physical manifestation of this desire became Electric Labybug, the band's own recording studio, which was built using the severance they received from Dreamworks.

"We were very fortunate to be dropped we've been doing well after leaving that label," Conley said.

With their own studio, Conley said, the band is much more free to record--and has been able to put out two records in the last two years with work already begun on a third. These three albums, "Sound the Alarm," "Under the Boards" and the yet-to-be-released third, will form a trilogy that tells the story of Conley's personal existential crisis.

"I'm going through this evolution right now," Conley said. "I'm becoming more aware of myself and [starting] to realize that I had a lot of really messed up ways of thinking about life."

Conley said his band mates were fed up with his bitter negativity and had him go to therapy.

"I started to kind of unravel my whole life," he said. "I realized that I turned out that way because the world is a really strange place right now, and there's not that much comfort being yourself."

That outlook left Conley filled with self-loathing--until he decided to face it. The result of that process was "Sound the Alarm," which found him coming to terms with his inner darkness.

"It was a really scary time and a really weird time for me," Conley said. "So that album turned out to be really brutal."

Saves The Day is a band that has been known for Conley's emotional and, sometimes, macabre lyrics. Now that he's dealt with some of that emotion, the lyrics have gotten less dark, but have the same heart that fans fell in love with.

"If you ever feel overwhelmed by emotion, or if you ever feel lost or alone," Conley said, "Saves The Day would be a great place to turn, because that's how I feel--and you might feel comfort knowing that someone else out there feels that way and they live through the emotions, and they can survive it, too."

Ryan Brosmer is a freelance writer and student at Virginia Commonwealth University. Reach him at
Email: brosmerra@vcu.edu.