Skip to main content
Music Radar MusicRadar The No.1 website for musicians
  • Guitars
  • Amps
  • Pedals
  • Drums
  • Synths
  • Software
  • Pianos
  • Controllers
  • Recording
  • Buyer’s guides
  • Live
  • DJ
  • Advice
  • Acoustic
  • Bass
  • About us
  • More
    • Reviews
Magazines
  • Computer Music
  • Electronic Musician
  • Future Music
  • Keyboard Magazine
  • Guitarist
  • Guitar Techniques
  • Total Guitar
  • Bass Player
More
  • How to make an AI cover song
  • 84000+ free music samples
  • Foo Fighters' new drummer
  • Ken Scott on recording The Beatles
  • First EVH Jump synth recording

When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

  1. Home
  2. News

Saves The Day's Chris Conley talks DIY roots, cult fame and At Your Funeral

By Rich Chamberlain
published 1 May 2014

Cult hero on 20 years of emo pop punk

Saves The Day's Chris Conley talks At Your Funeral
Cult emo hero on two decades of Saves The Day

Saves The Day's Chris Conley talks At Your Funeral

It’s difficult to believe that it has been 13 years since Saves The Day released their cult classic emo/pop punk record Stay What You Are.

It’s even more of a stretch to take on board that Chris Conley has been the band’s lynchpin, primary songwriter and frontman for 20 years. We caught up with Conley - the only original member left in the band – while Saves The Day were on the road with Brand New, and talked over two decades as a cult emo hero…

Page 1 of 10
Page 1 of 10
Early days
"I could just do it for fun and it seemed like the whole world outside would go away."

Early days

“I had no goals at all in the early days. I was just a kid with a guitar and I just loved writing songs. I could just do it for fun and it seemed like the whole world outside would go away.

"I had a couple of friends at school that played guitar and drums and they would come in with these tapes that were recordings of them playing Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath riffs and they didn’t have a singer.

“I thought it was so cool and one weekend they asked me to come play with them. I went and we started playing every weekend. It was the most fun ever. That was 1993. Four years later, after we’d made a series of recordings under different names, we made a demo tape and changed our name to Saves The Day.”

Page 2 of 10
Page 2 of 10
Basement shows
"Bryan dragged me out of the basement and put me on stage."

Basement shows

“We were playing in basements all over. Wherever we could find a show in somebody’s basement we would go play it.

"There was no direction, it was all just fun. Our drummer Bryan [Newman] did have ambition though, and he wanted to get signed to an indie label and go on tour.

“He read stories of bands touring the world in a van, playing sweaty hardcore shows and putting out records. Bryan dragged me out of the basement and put me on stage. I was just a kid that wrote the songs, I never dreamed of being the frontman, it just wound up that way because I wrote the tunes. It feels natural now to have wound up here but I still don’t know how it happened.”

Page 3 of 10
Page 3 of 10
Doing it DIY
"We didn't even know about having people pay $5 to come watch us."

Doing it DIY

“It was very DIY in the early days. We would just play a friend’s basement or a friend of a friend’s place. There were no labels and no money involved, it was just to have a good time.

"We didn’t even know about having people pay $5 to come watch us, it was just, ‘Please, come watch us play.’ Little by little this word of mouth thing happened, all these cool hardcore bands started talking about these little kids that were playing sort of hardcore music but they were singing.

"The label Equal Vision caught wind of it and came to see us play. They called us up and said they wanted to put out our record. We were jumping up and down on the other end of the line.

“In our senior year we had a winter break and went into the studio for eight days and recorded what became Can’t Slow Down. We were lucky that the label were just sweethearts, they knew we were little kids and protected us.”

Page 4 of 10
Page 4 of 10
Early haters
"People were genuinely upset that my voice didn't sound like it did on the demo."

Early haters

“When we put out our first album in 1997 people were genuinely upset that my voice didn’t sound like it did on the demo.

"I was surprised by that, I didn’t think reactions like that would be part of my every day existence of being in a band, I was just doing it for myself.

“I’ve had to learn how to hold those comments at arm’s length. It’s just people’s opinions, but I’m a human being so I am affected by them, that’s natural. I try not to hear that stuff and our music has just changed on its own.

"What you’re listening to comes into it as well. I might find a tape of The Beatles and then realise, ‘Hey, I actually like the Beatles,’ and then I’ll be on a massive kick of listening to The Beatles and the music evolves as my taste evolves.”

Page 5 of 10
Page 5 of 10
Stay What You Are
"All of a sudden people were singing along to every word."

Stay What You Are

“By Stay What You Are I really felt confident and like I knew what I was doing. I started to have a lot more fun writing.

"I had a recording set-up of my own and I would spend the entire day down there building songs in my own little world. We had a lot of momentum and you could feel the shows getting bigger. We went from playing to 25 people on Can’t Slow Down to 400 people on Through Being Cool to 1,000 people on Stay What You Are. That was a total thrill and all of a sudden people were singing along to every word.

“We had no idea [At Your Funeral] would do so well but we could tell that when we played it live people were losing their minds for it. That’s why we made it the single. It was amazing that it was on TV so much, we couldn’t believe it. Then we went on tour with Weezer, Green Day and Blink-182. We played Madison Square Garden, it was wild.”

Page 6 of 10
Page 6 of 10
In Reverie - the difficult follow-up
"I've never felt pressure because I don't do this to be successful."

In Reverie - the difficult follow-up

“I’ve never felt pressure because I don’t do this to be successful. I’m surprised by success. I was just in my little studio working away having a blast.

"Hours would go by before I’d come up for air. Today I don’t think that I’m the guy from Saves The Day, it doesn’t occur to me.

“I have an oblivious nature and I can drift into the music, so I didn’t feel pressure at all. We were still on an independent label at that point because we didn’t want to deal with major labels trying to make us something that we weren’t. We’d been wined and dined by all the major labels but we decided that it wasn’t our scene at the time.”

Page 7 of 10
Page 7 of 10
Daybreak
"Underneath all of those moving pieces I was still working away."

Daybreak

“[The four year gap between 2007’s Under The Boards and 2011 album Daybreak] was interesting. As a songwriter I kept working.

"I was writing the whole time so there was a lot of material backing up. While we were trying to suss out who was going to be in the band and who wasn’t and which label we were going to be with, underneath all of those moving pieces I was still working away with ideas in the studio.

"Once we did finally bring Daybreak to life, when I got back into the studio it was a little bit like I was a kid in a candy store, there were so many ideas to pick from. So I had so much fun with all the music that had backed up. That time allowed the songs on Daybreak to really evolve.”

Page 8 of 10
Page 8 of 10
Songwriting
"It's so loud that it's almost a nuisance, but I must obey it."

Songwriting

“[The writing process] is out of my control because I just have melodies floating around in my head. Sometimes I can’t go to sleep, I have to get up and work on a song.

"That’s where the majority of the ideas start, just some drifting melody that I pluck out of the background noise in my mind.

“I’ll record it and find the chords for it later and turn it into a song. There are moments when it’s quiet and then there are moments when it’s so loud that it’s almost a nuisance, but I must obey it. I treat it like a higher part of myself that is trying to get me to pay attention.”

Page 9 of 10
Page 9 of 10
Saves The Day 2014
"We'll wash, rinse, repeat forever and just keep going."

Saves The Day 2014

“My goal now is to keep making records and to keep touring for as long as I can.

We’re out on Warped Tour this summer and after that we’re going to work on some new music, do another tour of the States in winter and when that’s over early next year we’ll start chipping away at the stone of making another album. That’s always my favourite part. Then we’ll wash, rinse, repeat forever and just keep going.”

For more information visit the official Saves The Day website, or connect with the band on Facebook and Twitter.

Page 10 of 10
Page 10 of 10
Rich Chamberlain
Rich Chamberlain
Social Links Navigation

Rich is a teacher, one time Rhythm staff writer and experienced freelance journalist who has interviewed countless revered musicians, engineers, producers and stars for the our world-leading music making portfolio, including such titles as Rhythm, Total Guitar, Guitarist, Guitar World, and MusicRadar. His victims include such luminaries as Ice T, Mark Guilani and Jamie Oliver (the drumming one).

More about guitars
Bernth

What’s wrong with modern metal guitar? This guitarist explains all in a two-and-a-half-minute song

The IK Multimedia ToneX Pedal completes the ToneX ecosystem and offers players an unlimited range of sounds

Real amps Vs profiles: IK Multimedia's Tonex pedal impresses in a blind test

Latest
Epiphone Emily Wolfe Sheraton Stealth

Emily Wolfe and Epiphone team up for the classy 'White Wolfe' signature Sheraton, finished in Aged Bone White

See more latest ►
Most Popular
5 of the best free guitar amp simulator plugins

By "OSC" Steve6 June 2023

Watch a teenage Josh Freese appear in a promo video for Simmons electronic drums

By Stuart Williams5 June 2023

Danny Carey reveals the Tool songs he finds most difficult to play live

By Stuart Williams5 June 2023

How Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Out Of My Head was written in a couple of hours and took most of its sounds from the Korg Triton

By Ben Rogerson5 June 2023

Score significant savings on Strats, Teles, Jaguars and Mustangs as Thomann slashes the price of popular Squier models

By Daryl Robertson5 June 2023

10 of the best new free plugins we discovered this month

By Matt Mullen5 June 2023

Choose a genre and BPM and this online DAW will use AI to make a complete track for you

By Ben Rogerson5 June 2023

Watch Noel Gallagher use a Fender Strat for High Flying Birds’ “blasphemous” cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart

By Jonathan Horsley2 June 2023

Ben Folds names the only album on which Elton John is “represented as a piano player”

By Ben Rogerson2 June 2023

Is Dave Grohl’s new Epiphone DG-335… Gold?

By Jonathan Horsley2 June 2023

Show Us Your Studio #1: This modular madhouse is giving us serious gear envy

By MusicRadar2 June 2023

  1. plugins
    1
    10 of the best new free plugins we discovered this month
  2. 2
    Is Dave Grohl’s new Epiphone DG-335… Gold?
  3. 3
    Score significant savings on Strats, Teles, Jaguars and Mustangs as Thomann slashes the price of popular Squier models
  4. 4
    How to make an AI cover song with any artist's voice
  5. 5
    Behringer launches the Moog-esque Edge and Spice synths and hits back at “all the critics who claim that we’re driven by profit”
  1. jon hopkins
    1
    Jon Hopkins spent 4 months perfecting the synth riff for Open Eye Signal on a 1979 Korg MS-20: “So much effort into trying to make something sound effortless”
  2. 2
    10 of the best new free plugins we discovered this month
  3. 3
    Watch Noel Gallagher use a Fender Strat for High Flying Birds’ “blasphemous” cover of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart
  4. 4
    Score significant savings on Strats, Teles, Jaguars and Mustangs as Thomann slashes the price of popular Squier models
  5. 5
    Propellerhead’s ReBirth is reborn as a hands-on hardware synth, and it’s all thanks to Look Mum No Computer

MusicRadar is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site.

  • About Us
  • Contact Future's experts
  • Terms and conditions
  • Privacy policy
  • Cookies policy
  • Accessibility Statement
  • Careers

© Future Publishing Limited Quay House, The Ambury, Bath BA1 1UA. All rights reserved. England and Wales company registration number 2008885.