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From The Editor's Floor: Chris Conley of Saves The Day

Posted by Steven Robertshaw on 21-Nov-07 @ 12:41 PM

We here at AP love to talk. So much so, that when we do interviews with the rich and famous (or the on-tour and barely scraping by and eating Taco Bell), we end up with an excess of Q&As that can't be wedged into the magazine, no matter which way we turn it. This is why we have From The Editor's Floor. This week, enjoy music editor Scott Heisel's full, unedited interview with Saves The Day frontman Chris Conley. -AP SCOTT HEISEL: Where are you right now? CHRIS CONLEY: I'm at home in California. It's really nice, although I was up till 6 in the morning working on a side project with Max and Coby from Say Anything, so I'm pretty tired. How did that come about? We're just good buddies, so we thought one day we'd just try to write songs together. It turned out to be very easy, and we came up with a bunch of songs and decided to record them. It's kind of like semi-spontaneous. As long as a label wants to put it out, it will come out. How much of this record is autobiographical? Well Saves The Day has always been autobiographical, but more on an emotional level. The images are always more poetic forms of emotions. It's all extremely real. It's part of this trilogy we're working on. At the end of Under The Boards, it's the moment in the trilogy I'm finally coming to terms with all of the negative things I've been bringing into my life, and all of the mistakes I've made and all of the people I've pushed away. And I realize it's all coming from within me, from this black turmoil inside. So the whole trilogy is about searching every last corner of your soul so that you could be comfortable living with yourself, and you don't have to fight against yourself, because that only creates misery in my life. So the whole trilogy is about me accepting what I've done wrong, and how I've hurt people and how I've hurt myself and how the mistakes that I made and the people that I've hurt nearly cost me everything, and I had to really turn myself around, so the trilogy is the story of me taking accountability for my actions and trying to put my life back together after a difficult few years of things slowly falling apart. So the end of Under The Boards is a really dark moment of that story, but it's the moment where I finally have nothing else to do but learn how to live in the right manner or I can just kill myself now. And on the last song, "Turning Over In My Tomb," I decide to come out of my self-imposed exile. The sun begins to come up; I decide to carry on and do the hard work and figure out how to become the man I want to be. But I have to go through some difficult changes and face some really scary stuff, and that's the end of Under The Boards. It's very chaotic. "Woe" is something I never thought I would hear from Saves The Day. That's the lowest point of the whole trilogy. "Woe" is the moment where Darth Vader tells Luke that he's his father, and then Luke falls into the abyss. That's "Woe." You have no more excuses. I have no one else to blame. I just have to face the fact that I'm torn up inside. So "Woe" is me diving in and going, "What the heck is going on inside of me?" Because I realized I'm scaring everybody away with the monster I've become, so I have to face it now or my life's over, because everyone's left me; I'm all alone now. How do you define that "monster"? Is it internal? It's all very real things. My life fell apart, and I nearly lost everything I held near and dear. I realized I was the root of all my problems, deep down. There were many different situations where my personal shortcomings played out and made situations more difficult. We had a pretty hard year in the band; it was just a really strenuous year. But I mean, everybody's got turmoil; life's tough. I'm just a really sensitive dude, and if I don't directly call out my own inadequacies, it creates more problems in my life. So I have to learn how to confront my own shortcomings. Now whether that's being caught in a paranoid delusion and thinking everybody's out to get me--that's what Sound The Alarm was about--or whether it's the fact that I'm in a 27-year-long paranoid delusion that affects the lives of people around me and makes people miserable at times having to deal with an emotional mess. The trilogy is Saves The Day at our most human, most raw and most naked. Did you know going into Sound The Alarm that this trilogy was going to happen, or did it just play out after? I knew it was the story of my coming undone, and I just continued to write the story because I didn't think it was finished. It wasn't intended, but there were a bunch of songs during Sound The Alarm that were part of this story, but they didn't fit on the record so they wound up on Under The Boards. The story of me losing my mind, essentially. You sing in the first song "37 years till my life runs out." Was it uncomfortable to write that? I'm really spontaneous writing lyrics. I just sit there and let whatever comes out come out. That line just happened to be the first thing that came out when I sat down. It was just my creative muse operating. Are you aware of your own mortality? I think in general Saves The Day reflects my inner-world, essentially, so all the concerns and fears are me. STD is just me expressing myself. I'm just a normal human being trapped in an impermanent reality, simultaneously cursed to watch everything around me die, and blessed to enjoy this gift of life. Saves The Day is my diary, so to speak. Do you already have Daybreak mapped out? We have demos of about a third of it. We're still arranging it. Lots of the content is written; we're still putting the pieces together. It will definitely be out next year. You recorded this record with Marc Hudson and Eric Stenman. They're two guys who travel with us on the road. Marc does front-of-house [sound], and Eric's our tour manager. They're both brilliant when it comes to audio, so we signed 'em up to do the album with us. It was an intimate little environment. We hope they come back and do Daybreak. It was a lot of fun. Will you record in your own studio again? Yeah, we invested some money in it so we could work whenever we wanted, and so we're gonna keep doing albums here at the Bug, which is what we call it. Speaking of that, Eric recorded The Bug Sessions Vol. 1. Is there plans for a second volume? Yeah, there are. It will either be out later this year or early next year. It will probably be out a couple months after the album comes out. Is it an unusual choice to do an acoustic tour to support this record? We're just trying to take care of our fans as best as we know how, and we know our fans like to see us play acoustic. Does it limit you in terms of setlist? Have you ever seen us play acoustic? Yeah, a number of times. The last time was on Warped Tour, but that was still with a full band. Obviously, you couldn't just play "Kaliedoscope" with just you and David. It would lose a lot of its' momentum. I suppose it's all up for debate, but we're looking forward to it. We'll play a healthy mixture. We have over 100 songs now, so we really have to select from the whole spectrum, or peoples' favorite songs will get left off the list. You've been playing "Can't Stay The Same" since early 2006. What's the oldest song on the record? "Woe" was the very first song I wrote after a year-and-a-half-long writer's block/depression following In Reverie. "Woe" is the song that was me in my lowest moment, and me in my lowest moment was why this trilogy was born, so I could get through it and survive it, and pull myself out of the hole. The trilogy is me pulling myself out of this hole--this self-imposed grave I've dug for myself. "Woe" is the song that kind of burst open the floodgates of creativity. If you listen to that song, you can hear how pained the music is. Not just the vocals; the music itself is very tense. Shortly after "Woe," I wrote "Under The Boards," and right after that, I wrote "Sound The Alarm," and right after that, I wrote "Bye Bye Baby." This is all dating back to Fall 2004. I wrote "Getaway" during the Sound The Alarm sessions; "Because You Are No Other" was another song we had during those sessions. But like I was saying before, a bunch of them didn't fit in the story of losing my mind, so we had to figure out where to take the story next. That group of songs was extremely desperate and bleak, which is where the story needed to go, because I couldn't get through to the other side without going through the really hard stuff first, without facing my demons. The transition from "Because You Are No Other" into "Kaleidoscope" is very jarring. Was that intentional? Yeah. "Kaleidoscope" is where you wake up from a nightmare and realize, "Oh, my God, what have I done? I've forced all these people away." I wanted it to be like waking up from a bad dream, but your reality is worse than the dream. Then it goes into "Woe," which is now that I realize I did this to myself, what am I? What kind of monster have I become? I face it in "Woe" and really get to the depths of my soul. It's like primal scream therapy. I'm left completely raw and naked at the end of "Woe," left to die or live alone--like I sing in "Turning Over In My Tomb"--but the nice thing people should realize is I make the decision to stick around and come out of my tomb and learn how to put the pieces back together and become the man I've always known I wanted to be. So it's ultimately a story of hope and redemption; this is just the scary chapter where we hit the lowest of the low. You mention the idea of suicide on the record. Is that something you as a person in real life came close to? I like to leave as much as I can in the music, but what I'll say is during Sound The Alarm, in the bridge of "Sound The Alarm" I question whether I'm going to put up with this painful existence: "In the darkness of my mind/I hear a voice that seems to sigh/I'm gonna die before I save myself". Then on "Turning Over In My Tomb," I kind of pose the same question to myself: "I'm stuck under the boards/Nowhere to run, not anymore/Left to die here all alone/Or choose to live here on my own." Then I make the decision to reach my hand above the ground. And within the first three minutes of Daybreak, there's a pleasant twist on the "Sound The Alarm" bridge which offers resolution, but I can't give you too many details. [Laughs.] Are you ever concerned what your family members might think listening to these records? Since day one, when I started writing music when I was 14, there were always lines that I could tell [made] my parents uneasy. My dad would say, "Why would you write that?" The weird thing about Saves The Day is we get recognition for being honest, but it's not the recognition we're after. I'm doing this just to literally stay strong [and] keep my head above the waves. Saves The Day is my personal church; it's my confession. It's private; it's personal. We just happened to become semi-popular along the way, but that was all completely by chance. If it were up to me, I'd probably still be in my house writing songs in my basement, because I lacked ambition to book shows and stuff. But I'm very thankful to wind up in this incredible position. So I feel really lucky to get to do this, and at the same time, it's really private, so it hurts sometimes to know that people make their own opinions about it when it has nothing to do with them, but I value the fact that people get to listen, or I wouldn't get to keep making this music and saving myself through the process. I have to take the good with the bad. It's scary, leaving myself open like that. But I do it to survive. Are you anticipating fans coming up to you at shows and relating their own depression stories? Is that hard to have those conversations because it is such a personal thing? No, I think it's beautiful, because everybody has a hard time, sometimes. Sometimes, all you need is to know someone else went through that and they still seem to be sticking around. I'm giving myself hope, and through that, hopefully others will get hope. I'm really just expressing my own truth. Because I'm not making anything up, it's bound to resonate with people. One thing I've noticed about Saves The Day is it's always been true for me. Some people think the lyrics are more put on if they're not the same age I was when I wrote it. For example, a lot of people think our early stuff is more sincere because it's really desperate and high school drama and extremely uncomfortable insecurities. So kids that are young obviously relate to the albums I wrote when I was young. As people get older, they start to appreciate the newer records. They can see Sound The Alarm is an album about growing up and coming to a crossroads, and being kind of like uncertain of it all. I think people will see that it's true. They might not if they're 17, but once they're 27, they will. alt Portions of this interview originally appeared in AP 233.