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“Nightingale” – Saves The Day
(Words/music: Saves the Day, available on Stay What You Are, Vagrant Records 2001)

While writing an entirely separate post this afternoon (one I finished and decided to save for revision), I re-discovered Stay What You Are, an album I haven’t heard since the first half of this decade.  When I was a senior in high school, I discovered pop-punk through a Get Up Kids album on an end display.  Soon, I was consuming as much pop punk as Napster (and whatever I used after Napster was shut down) could find me – good or bad.  It wasn’t until I got to college that I started to filter the good from the run-of-the-mill (coincidentally, around the time that I started to explore Superchunk’s back catalog, but that’s for another day).  At first, it didn’t matter – it was new music that sounded like music I liked, so I wanted to hear all of it. 

That being said, only a few discs and some stray MP3s made it through that initial sorting period.  As quickly as I developed a taste for pop-punk, I realized that I didn’t enjoy a lot of it.  For every album that I loved, I had three or four other non-descript EPs or albums from bands I couldn’t distinguish from each other.  That being said, Stay What You Are stuck out, perhaps in part because of my obsession with Vagrant Records circa 2000 – 2001, perhaps because Chris Conley’s voice was uniquely melodic and whiny.  However, part of the credit goes to the songwriting - these songs were better than a lot of their peers.  In particular, “Nightingale” stands out as slightly more complex than a lot of the three chord romps playing in my Discman.  Listening to it now, it kind of sounds like the kind of cleanly produced, solidly written pop that comes with a slight “punk” sheen, but I’d be fine if there were more songs like this on the radio.  When compared with his contemporaries, I appreciate Conley’s attention to detail and focus on imagery in his lyrics – his words mirror the (relatively) somber feeling of the music.  It’s probably not something I’d take to right now if I heard it for the first time, but I’m also closer to being thirty than to being a teenager.  That being said, I can still appreciate the care for his craft, something I didn’t always see in some of his contemporaries.

Still, I’m glad I came back across this album, as it’s an interesting personal artifact in addition to a few songs that I’ve missed hearing without even realizing it.  It’s songs like these that act like Proust’s Madeleine, bringing back memories of a very specific time in my life.

More on Saves the Day: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm