Fruit is my real love," says saves the Day singer-songwriter Chris Conley, a gentle spirit of twenty-one summers. "Pears and apples and grapes and bananas. I can't believethat stuff exists. It's a miracle to me." Not your average punk-rock credo, but then Saves the Day aren't your average punk-rock band.

Saves the Day's earnestly emotional rock is striking a chord with audiences. These youthful dudes - the oldest, guitarist David Soloway, is twenty-three - have spent the last four years touring in a van, doing everything their own way. In the past few months, they have shocked the music industry by selling more than 120,000 copies of their third indie album, Stay What You Are, which debuted in the Top 100 of the Billboard album chart with no corporate push and practically zero radio airplay. "It's hard to get your music heard when you don't have that millions of dollars behind you," says Conley. "Kids have to do research to find music that isn't getting shoved down their throats. They're looking for music that doesn't sound like what's on the radio."

Saves the Day feel right at home on their indie label, Vagrant Records, and have no regrets about sticking to the underground punk ethic. "A lot of young rock bands just get run through the major-label grinder," says bassist Eben D'Amico. "They'll get a bunch of money dumped into them, and they'll have a single that gets airplay on the radio or MTV, but it's this weird artificial audience. I've seen bands like that operate, and it's not the same. We wouldn't do it anymore if it weren't in our own hands."

On Stay What You Are, Conley sings his songs about grief ("They'll lay me on the dinner table/And I will be the pig with the apple in my mouth") and pain ("I can't tell if it's me or the meat that's rotting"). "The new album probably reflects where we are as people," says Conley, a seeker inspired by spiritual texts such as the Vedas, the Tao Te Ching and the works of Krishnamurti. "I think there's a monumental change that happens to people in their early twenties. There are studies showing that people change every seven years, to accompany the renewal of every cell in your body. So we've just done a lot of changing."

Some of the changes have been painful. In March 2000, the band members were seriously injured when their van crashed while on tour. "The accident changed my whole perspective on things," Conley says. "We spent a week convalescing in Wisconsin and went back on the road. I was in a sling, and David had no teeth. But we went through it together - it's a symbiosis, you know?"

Saves the Day's thoughtful approach often gets the band lumped in with the "emo" scene. Most bands hate the emo label, but not Conley. "I tend not to hate too many things," he admits. "I'm more a distributor of love than hate. I don't care if anyone thinks I'm a cheeseball. I think it's OK whatever people wanna call it. It could be called 'hula-hoop music' - I don't care. We are what we are."

After so many years on the road, Saves the Day are playing arenas for the first time, opening for Weezer. "Last night, during Weezer's sound check," Conley says, "I was sitting way up in the last row, and I kept having these flashes of playing to eleven people in a basement. And loving it, you know? Now we are playing to thousands of people, and still loving it. That's weird."

ROB SHEFFIELD
(RS 892 - Mar. 28, 2002)