This is Not An Exit

It’s hard to know where to start when I talk about Saves The Day. Ever since I first heard them when I was a teenager, their music and the words of Chris Conley have been a constant in my life. Their songs transcend the mere words, notes and combination thereof; they touch at the inner truth of existing as a human being, the forming of relationships and bonds, and touching of hearts that makes us who we are. This will be the first post I plan on doing in a series of posts leading up to release of their new album, Daybreak on September 13th, in a retrospective of sorts, going through each album and its own meaning in my life. Consider this an introduction.

Saves The Day are best known as a punk band from Princeton, New Jersey, at least that’s how they started out, but in a span of 14 years their musical sensibilities have ranged from pop-punk, emo, indie, to sounds reminiscent of The Beatles. Often it was Saves The Day’s ability to do one of these quite well that would pigeon-hole them into a specific genre only to leave fans scratching their heads as they further expanded their range on their next release. They are a well-travelled band, having toured with artists such as Snapcase, Weezer, Blink-182, Green Day, Taking Back Sunday and Circa Survive. The band went from indie labels to actually being on a major label for a brief stint, only to be dropped after the label went under shortly after the album’s release.

Chris Conley, the man behind Saves The Day

The band has seen their share of ups and downs, with 14 different members and a different line-up for all but 2 albums; “they” manage to keep a consistency of musical ability and pop prowess with front man Chris Conley holding the reins. Conley is a true master of words and the human spirit, writing songs that not only tell stories, but speak to the harsh, uplifting and honest parts about being alive. Conley is Saves The Day, and Saves The Day is Conley, his relationships, thoughts, feelings and fears are transcribed within the lyric sheets in each album. Yet with each ounce of pain expressed in a Saves The Day song, comes gallons of hope a joy through the music that is created. Many of Conley’s lyrics and music take you back to your own moments and feelings through his own, and over the years they stop becoming about one specific moment, and about the moment you are listening to them in, whether it’s driving through the desert, or shouting along at a show.

This is my first big undertaking for this blog, but hopefully it will act as a catalyst for even bigger things. Stay tuned for the first retrospective of Saves The Day’s first album, 1997’s Can’t Slow Down.

For more info check out the Saves the Day entry on Wikipedia

Let me scrub that brackish line

So I'm kind of falling in love with The Weakerthans. Granted I think I only have one album (maybe two) but every time they come up on shuffle I find myself engrossed in the simple hooks and lovely creative lyrics that I want to repeat to myself over and over.

stuff like:

"The airport's almost always empty this time of the year, so let's go play on a baggage carousel.."

"And I'm leaning, on this broken fence, between past and present tense"

Not to mention the build up in "Watermark" that explodes into this line:
"Hold on to the corners of today, and we'll fold it up to save until it's needed"

I really am an emo kid at heart. I'm looking forward to listening to some more of their stuff.

Links!
The Weakerthans on Last.fm

The Weakerthans - Watermark (You Tube):

The Weakerthans - Civil Twlight (You Tube) (This is a really cool video)

Official Site

The iPod Adventure

So for this post, I thought I would talk about my iPod adventure. It started at work one day when I realized I could not think of anything to listen to. I had a full 80GB iPod classic at the time and I was missing about 30GB of my library. I was waiting for a friend who worked at the Apple store to use his friends and family discount to get me a 160GB classic. So I figured, "Damn, if I have this much music, I should really try to make sure I've heard every track at least once."

Now time for a little background, or more so an explanation of why I have so much music. My favorite band is Queen. When I listened to their Greatest Hits album at the age of 11, I loved every song. When I got Classic Queen (The US Equivalent of Greatest Hits II) very soon after, it was the same story. They would end up becoming  favorite band. The whole story is probably for another post, but essentially for the next few years I bought all their studio albums and became a fan of the entire catalog. This initial experience influenced and somewhat formulated my music listening habits forever. Only now am I realizing that just because I like a few songs or even one entire album from a band,  it does not mean I need to listen to their entire discography. This of course became even easier to do with the advent of the Internet, where an entire band's discography is only a few clicks away.

So I have gathered a lot of music, a lot of it I have ripped form my personal collection, a lot of it I grabbed out of curiosity off the Internet. Once it gets categorized and organized into my music folders, It sometimes gets lost in the shuffle of other more important new music coming in. So the goal of the iPod adventure was to listen to all of this music just to make sure I didn't "miss" anything. Here's the other thing about my somewhat massive music collection, it takes a lot, I mean a lot for me to to delete anything. Simply because tastes change. More than once have I found something I didn't care for years ago only to rediscover it after a song comes up on shuffle.

So I am almost at the one year anniversary and I've listened to probably around 8000 songs and powered through to the letter M. I don't exclusively listen to music just to complete the adventure. If I know what I want to listen to I listen to it, but when I can't think of what to listen to I just pull up the next artist down the list and go for it. So that's the story on going adventure that I'm sure will come up more than once. 

What does it all mean?

This is my music blog. I love music, immensely. I love the overwhelming feeling when a song can literally take your breath away when you hear it the first time. I love what it can do to your state of mind, the way it can change your mood or reinforce it, act as a backdrop, or a vehicle to take you somewhere else.

What made me want to start this blog, was the fact that I realized I gradually stopped felling the same way about music that I remembered feeling when I was a teenager. I remembered when everything that touched my ears was golden and I was discovering new artists (or new to me at least) on a weekly basis.

Lately I noticed there were very few bands I was listening to that were either the same, or extensions of the bands I liked years ago. This year I turned 25, which seems strange to me since my own personal musical renaissance started around the time I turned 15. I want to feel that way again, and this blog is dedicated to that. The title is a little misleading, because I will admit that I'm jaded about my music experiences and tastes, but hopefully this blog will highlight the good more than the bad.Oh, and the title of this blog lifted form a Pinhead Circus song, I always thought the phrase was kind of clever and it stuck with me.