Saves The Day look back on 15 years of 'Through Being Cool'
It doesn't matter who you are, where you've been or what you're doing: If you walk into any room on the planet and tell someone you love Saves The Day's Through Being Cool—and that someone knows what you're talking about—you better settle in for a long night. Because if nothing else, you're promised to have an invigorating, passionate and extensive conversation about precisely how influential that album is, was, and forever will be. Coming off 1998's Can't Slow Down and 1999's I'm Sorry I'm Leaving EP, nobody saw this coming. Nobody could have ever predicted that Chris Conley would go on to write an entire album filled with the purest form of battle cry. It would end up speaking to every heartbroken and angry teenage mind to ever button up a pair of skinny jeans, and it would ultimately not just pave, but bulldoze, the way for the pop-punk boon of the early 2000s that rode the rising waves of Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday, among many, many others.
Now, as Through Being Cool turns 15 on Nov. 2, Alternative Press caught up with the current members of the band to reflect on what went into recording the album, where it sits among the rest of the Saves The Day catalog and, of course, how it feels to craft a perfect record.
Have you listened to Through Being Cool lately from front to back?
CHRIS CONLEY: Oh my God, I should have done that before this interview.
ARUN BALI: I did within the last couple of weeks.
CONLEY: And Dennis, you said you'd been listening to it?
DENNIS WILSON: Yeah, I did yesterday. I was rehearsing for the tour.
CONLEY: Is that because you love it so much? Oh yeah, it was rehearsal, right. [Laughs.]
BALI: We have some cool things in store for the anniversary, so I went through the record.
And what do you think of it now?
CONLEY: I think it stands up very well. It stands the test of time.
PALMA: Every time I listen to it, there are songs that stick out to me. The record definitely felt like it was the turning point in where melodic hardcore was going. It was kind of like, “This is the way forward.” I think the fans sometimes call it pop-punk, but to me, it's just like a great melodic rock record. There are a lot of things that draw from a lot of references and influences and it just makes for a cool record. It's a cool listen.
BALI: It's funny how production values have changed, too. Through Being Cool is such a raw-sounding record. Fifteen years later, I still tend to prefer something like that, [something] that has an organic, raw feel. For me, it holds up.
CONLEY: It's still pretty fresh-sounding. It's like you can press it after the fact. Print it, baby. Print it. I'd imagine if I'd heard it recently, I'd be like, “Damn, this is so good.” [Laughs.]
Do you guys each have a favorite song on the record?
CONLEY: I like them all. I do want to say that I like them all. I remember that album fondly and I remember every Saves The Day album fondly because they're all good. But I think “Holly Hox, Forget Me Nots” was the most forward-thinking song at the time. It didn't really sound like where we were coming from on Can't Slow Down at all. It sounded a lot more like Foo Fighters. And I think the band has continued to evolve into more of a pop-rock band and less like a hardcore punk band. In the years after Through Being Cool, I think “Holly Hox” connects the dots.
RODRIGO PALMA: I love playing all the songs on that record. They're super-fun. They bring me back to a time. Not even a time, but like an essence or a spirit when things are raw and it was just exciting to be playing music. So, that's cool. It feels very honest and emotional. I love “Holly Hox.” I also love “The Last Lie I Told.” I just think that's a really cool song.
BALI: The song “Through Being Cool” has a cool new wave, post-punk feel to it. Like what Rod was saying, re-imagining some of these songs live, a song like “My Sweet Fracture,” which I know means a lot to a lot of people lyrically. For us, the way we've been approaching it now… it's been fun to take a song that still has the spirit of 15 years ago, but then turn it into something that we would do today. “The Last Lie I Told” reminds me of a lot of post-hardcore stuff I would listen to back then.
WILSON: “Last Lie” is by far my favorite. We were just practicing one day and randomly broke it out in the studio and I remember realizing how awesome the structure of that song was. It makes me smile every time I hear it now.
Chris, I talked to you a few years ago for a different article somewhere else. We were talking about this record and you told me these were battle songs. Do you still feel that way when you listen back to these songs?
CONLEY: I don't remember saying that and I definitely don't remember feeling that way at all, but that's so funny, how you change over time. It's like, I maintain the right to change my mind at all times. [Laughs.] I would say looking back on them… if anything, that's probably coming from feeling sort of uncomfortable with people heckling at shows and having so much fun playing music and just wanting people to shut the hell up and let us play our songs. But the music has nothing to do with that. You listen to the lyrics and it's just like this lonely guy, who was longing for something more. The record has a lot of melancholy, which would play out in the years to come. But the songs are all very exciting, full of life. And I think I was still a little naive, so it has this innocence to it. So, I don't connect at all with that statement; I want to fight that guy that said that, because he's an idiot. [Laughs.] I would like to strike that from the record: I don't want to fight that guy; I think he was doing just fine.
Do you remember recording the record? Where there any stories that came out of those sessions?
CONLEY: I remember it very clearly. We recorded it in 11 days. Nine days and then two half-days. And that includes mixing. So, it was a whirlwind. To make a record like that today, people think they're rushing, but we were just having a blast. We were doing all-nighters, trying to get it all done. So, we would stay up all night, chillin' in the control room and sleeping on the floor in a lounge. We would rent movies from this ancient place called Blockbuster Video. It was sort of like a retro-modern library. We would go through movies that had multiple sequels, like A Nightmare On Elm Street or Friday The 13th, and we would just put one on after another. Tracking the record was a lot of fun. We were just kind of really psyched on how the songs were sounding. I remember how excited we were when the songs would come together. We were all really giddy about it. We were all doing college and at the time, we just finished the spring semester. [original STD drummer] Bryan Newman and I looked at each other at one point and I think it was when “Holly Hox” was coming together in the studio, and we just realized, “Hey, this is going to be really good, and we should just take a year off school and just tour.” Because we had been touring only where we could during that first year of college. So, we decided to just go for it because the songs in the studio just sounded so bitchin'.
Did you have any sense after the recording was done that it would be as special a record as it turned out to be?
CONLEY: I guess not in the context of time. I didn't know that 15 years later, we would be talking about it and people would be citing it as a major source of inspiration. But I could definitely feel how good it was. It felt fresh and exciting and awesome. It had a lot of energy. The songs are really cool. And it's very different from what we had done before with Can't Slow Down. So, I was on fire about it.
Can't Slow Down was a lot quicker and harder. Was it a conscious decision to move toward the more poppy side of things with Through Being Cool?
CONLEY: No, I think it was just… You know how you find different bands or artists that inspire you over the years? There were really only a couple hardcore bands that really ever did it for me. The Gorilla Biscuits. Lifetime. Minor Threat. And bands like Propagandhi, even. I really liked their record, Less Talk, More Rock. By the time I was working on Through Being Cool, I had listened to those albums to death. And you find yourself looking for more stuff that excites you. The Colour And The Shape had come out, that Foo Fighters record, and also I had come back around to Weezer's album Pinkerton, which I did not like when it came out. But suddenly, six months later, it was like my favorite thing ever. The same thing happened with the Jawbreaker album Dear You. I did not like that when it came out. I was severely disappointed. And six months later, it was my favorite album. I also started listening, randomly, to Joni Mitchell's album Blue. Somebody gave that to me and I was just this lonely college guy living in my dorm room at NYU listening to Blue. And I really loved it. A friend of mine from high school gave me Van Morrison's Moondance. I was also listening to a lot of Archers Of Loaf and the Refused album, The Shape Of Punk To Come. That was such a cool and exciting record. We were listening to that just constantly in the van in the early days after Can't Slow Down, when we started touring a lot more. Those records were just on, and I was just soaking it up, so excited about it. I had already kind of worn out the few hardcore records I liked and I was just looking for more. So, that stuff just kind of comes out.
Like, once I found the Beatles, I realized my songs were sounding more like the Beatles. That's kind of just how it goes, in my opinion. You change and your musical tastes change. I was also playing tons and tons of guitar. When I wrote Can't Slow Down, I was only maybe four years removed from being a cello player in an orchestra, and I didn't take guitar lessons, so I taught myself. Can't Slow Down is me coming out of being an orchestra guy, not knowing the guitar. I was playing guitar a ton on the road, but in my dorm at NYU, I was alone, and I was just starting to play around with different shapes on the guitar. I didn't know what I was doing, but I just threw my hands on the thing. The chords became a little bit more fun to play with. So, as you grow as a musician, your musical interests change and the sounds kind of evolve. At least it does for me. It evolves all the time.
I also want to talk about the upcoming tour. Whose idea was it to go out and celebrate this record in this manner?
BALI: I think it was pretty collective. We knew that if we were going to do something like this, we wanted it to just feel like it was the right time and organic and not forced. Not to say other bands are doing that, but for us, we would get that question a lot: Why aren't you doing this? We were just like, “We didn't want to.”
CONLEY: I forgot about it for Can't Slow Down. I didn't even realize that it had been 15 years. I'm very oblivious; I'm just focused on the next thing.
PALMA: I guess in a way, we were focused on doing our thing—just putting out new records.
CONLEY: Yeah, I remember randomly it came up in a conversation with Max Bemis. We were just talking as friends one day, having a conversation on the phone. We were just talking about the past and stuff and I didn't realize that Through Being Cool was about to turn 15 in, like, a year-and-a-half or something. He was like, “Is A Real Boy is going to be turning 10 at the same time.” So, that was probably the beginning of the dawning of the idea. It just randomly came up. I don't think any of us sit here and plot what's the next, right step nearly as much as we should.
BALI: I think at this point, we just want to do what feels right.
It's a pretty short record. Are you going to play other songs?
CONLEY: We're just going to play it twice, we figure. [Laughs.]
BALI: We're going to do it forward and backward.
CONLEY: We'll play it at least once, and then probably go into a selection of people's favorite songs and our favorite songs.
Where do you guys think Through Being Cool lands in the legacy of Saves The Day? If you were going to rank albums, where do you think this sits?
CONLEY: I wouldn't rank them, but I would say it's the most important record that we did. Clearly. It definitely inspired a generation of musicians to start their own bands. You see it in interviews all the time: “Through Being Cool was our favorite record.” And that's just a really special thing. It's extremely surreal and bizarre, but wonderful and awesome and I feel proud of that. It was completely by the benefit of the record being good. It's not like we were some huge commercial success. This was before there were emo stars. The whole thing had not become a mainstream thing yet. It was the first record where people started to notice this cool scene that was going on underground. Bands like the Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World were out there killing it all over the country, putting out really cool records and people were starting to pick up on that. Within the next couple years, Alternative Press started covering all that stuff. Mike Shea just understood that this was a thing. It was a cultural thing that was really happening. It was kind of the beginning of all that. Not our record, but that moment. In 1999, there were a couple of really important records that came out that launched the whole thing into the stratosphere.
PALMA: Through Being Cool is definitely part of a moment. It's a very creative record. It's a very cool record. I guess it's part of a cultural moment, and that's really cool.
CONLEY: It's clearly having impact, which is awesome. It's hard to say how it's all going to look in 30 years—there’s going to be a body of work and a lot of different records—but to pin it down, it was definitely the record where people started to notice us. It was also a kick-ass record that inspired a lot of people.
Do you think there is anything you would change about the record?
CONLEY: Hell no, dude! That thing is awesome! I certainly learned over the years how to sing in a way that sounds nice to me and feels comfortable. But at the time, it's just so raw. It's just these little fucking kids playing punk rock and I wouldn't change anything about that. I'm so proud of the honesty and the courage. It's almost like blind courage because it's not like we were thinking about what we were doing.
BALI: I think most musicians listen back to records and say, “Oh, yeah. Maybe I would have done that differently.” But you learn from experience. So, those moments kind of need to happen.
PALMA: We've talked about what we were all doing during that time and I was like the band. We were all changing, growing up in that punk-rock world. We were listening to Lifetime and Jawbreaker, but we were also discovering that other shit. Like, Elliott Smith. So, it's kind of funny: we were in Michigan, having a similar experience just without this cool record to show for it. We were growing up in the same scene, just a few states away.
And finally, how does it feel to make a perfect record?
CONLEY: First of all, you're too sweet. [Laughs.]
BALI: Ask the Beatles.
CONLEY: Yes, ask Bowie. That is extremely flattering, just you saying that. But I do think it is a special record and I'm honored to have been a part of it. I had so much fun writing those songs and bringing them to life with the guys in the band at the time. I think we all had fun doing it. I'm proud that in hindsight, it was such an important record for a lot of other people, as well.
