DD&U’s Second Favorite Album of the Decade
Stay What You Are
2) Saves the Day, Stay What You Are (2001)
When I was in grammar school and high school, I was obviously into listening to music, but not really in a way beyond listening to what was on the radio. (For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s younger readers, a radio was an electronic box that received signals through the air and transformed them into music. [For Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun's older and well, my-aged readers, did anyone else always have a blank tape in the stereo, and go home immediately after school and listen to the radio until dinnertime, and record all the songs you liked {except you'd always have to time it so you didn't include the insipid DJ chatter at the start, so even though you had eight tapes and they all had Blink 182's "Dammit" on it, none of them had the guitar riff in the intro. Does} anyone remember] that?)
Long story short, I listened to plenty of music, but none of it was stuff that wasn’t at or near the top of the alternative rock charts, so I never had the type of punk-rock, emo outcast, let’s-go-to-a-local-band’s-concert-at-the-American-Legion-hall musical youth that a lot of people I know had. Which is a shame, because I would have loved to have checked out a Saves the Day show in some dingy parish center in Bloomfield, plugged in, playing tunes from Can’t Slow Down, maybe dancing next to some skinny Northern Jersey emo chick with dark eyeliner and some metal in her face. Who knows how things would have turned out!
Stay What You Are is a bit of a departure from Saves the Day’s first two punkier albums. The lyrics and melodies are a little more subdued. (I say this, but then you listen to a song like “As Your Ghost Takes Flight,” with such lyrics as “The last time that I saw you, August of ‘99, / I should’ve had my hammer and a few rusty spikes / To nail you on a wall and use bottles to catch your blood / And display you for the neighbors so they know your time had come.” So, you know, take my judgment with a grain of salt.) The first track, “At Your Funeral” (which includes my favorite bassline in all of rock music), sets the tone for the upbeat nature of the album. I say “upbeat” in a strictly musical sense, as the lyrical content sways from angry (the aforementioned “As Your Ghost Takes Flight”) to depressed (”See You”: And I’ll wear glass shoes and plastic wrap. / No, I’ll just wear my insides. / You want to know who I really am? / Yeah so do I) to ecstatic (”Firefly”: We’re up and we’re out and we’re yelling through the streets / and I’m out of my fucking mind) to despondent (”All I’m Losing Is Me”: The moon hangs like the blade of an axe tonight, / And it’s poised to drop sometime soon enough / On this dump truck where I lie mixed up with the morning’s trash) to whistful (”Nightingale”: I’ll have to walk a thousand miles just to find the ground deserving of your feet). It’s all couched in (relatively) peppy melodies, the value of which can’t be overstated: no matter what mood you’re in, there’s a song on this album that’ll make you feel better, or at least validated. (And if you’re just in the mood for some good tunes, then you’re in luck.)
Signature track: “This Is Not An Exit”
One time, I asked my ex-girlfriend what her favorite color was. (I don’t mean to keep bringing her up on this blog, because Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun is most certainly NOT that kind of blog. It just so happens that this particular anecdote that includes her as a foil is the best way for me to introduce a point I’d like to make about Saves the Day.) Anyway, she looked at me like I had 10 heads. “What do you mean, favorite color,” she asked. “I like a lot of colors.” My favorite color is green. I figured everyone had a favorite color. Everyone had favorite colors when were kids, right? It’s how you knew what ball to pick when you played mini golf, or which kinds of M&Ms to save for last when you had a whole handful. I was left feeling like I had missed the boat on opening my heart to new colors.
And then I wondered if people feel the same way about songs. They have to, right? If a person can’t commit to a color (and I’m limiting “color” here to like, the rainbow and its reasonable offshoots. I don’t want to hear any “I like #F600FF” nonsense in the comments), how could they possibly commit to a song? I don’t know how it works. But I do know that “This Is Not An Exit” is my favorite song.
Not my favorite rock tune. Not my favorite song of the decade. My favorite song. It’s not that other songs aren’t good. It’s just that I like this one the most. That’s why you’re reading about this album, plain and simple. All of its songs are very very good, and one of them is my favorite. And, at the end of the day, if the hook sets in the bottom of our lungs, we’ll rip it out and lick the blood off with our tongues.
Tags: "This Is Not an Exit", DD&UFAOTD:AMIMIFE, New Jersey, Saves the Day, where did all my radio mixes go
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 14th, 2010 at 12:45 am and is filed under Culture, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
January 14th, 2010 at 1:51 am
“goodnight & go” or “hide and seek” by imogen heap, depending on if i’m in a happy mood or a contemplative. also, purple. like a deep royal purple. my irish dancing costumes will attest to this.
January 14th, 2010 at 1:57 am
and is CC playing a gibson? it sounds good, nice and bright. ok, i’ll shut up
January 14th, 2010 at 11:59 am
Am I taking crazy pills? Does anyone else realize that this list could have been published in 2005 and would be the SAME list? Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that the #1 album is all of a sudden going to be from the second half of the decade. I don’t want to hear any “music was better back then” nonsense either… this is all about Tim leaning on the glory days of high school and college and not buying any albums since then!
Please change the thread to “Favorite Albums of 2000-2005, as reported in the years 2009 and 2010″
January 16th, 2010 at 12:12 am
The Official Roommate of DD&U has a well-taken point. I’m going to go ahead and spoil a bit of the latter part of this list and say that the number one album actually DOES come from the second half of the decade. But it’s true that a lot of the albums on this list so far (or, I guess, all of them?) come from the earlier part of the decade.
There’s a few reasons. Firstly, to quote a previous entrant on the list, “the songs you grow to like never stick at first.” I’ve actually bought quite a few albums since 12:01 a.m. January 1, 2005. The thing is, if I’m making a list of my favorite albums, it’s very difficult to justify including a very very good album released in 2008, over an album I’ve been listening to consistently for nine years. Thems the facts!
Another of the ORODDU is quite salient: “Does anyone else realize that this list could have been published in 2005 and would be the SAME list?” I don’t mean to be too cute by half, but this list COULDN’T be written in 2005, as it’s an end-of-the-decade list. However, comma, were I to write a “Favorite Albums of the Past Ten Years” list in 2005, you, my precious and treasured readers, could be assured that such a list would include a lot more Oasis, Our Lady Peace, Blink 182, and Metallica. Take the above graf, and add the fact that convention dictates that we do these retrospectives when the clock strikes 0, not 5. Although, if this crappy blog is around in five years and you all want it, I’ll gladly do a ten-year faves list then.
I was going to do this in a separate post, but this comment thread seems even better (never accuse me of not wanting to mix it up). Here is the 25-way tie for Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s Eleventh Favorite Album of the Decade:
Bedlight for Blue Eyes, “The Dawn” (2005)
Brian Vander Ark, “Resurrection” (2003)
Butch Walker, “Left of Self Centered” (2002)
Butch Walker, “The Rise and Fall of Butch Walker and the Lets Go Out Tonites” (2006)
Dashboard Confessional, “The Shade of Poison Trees” (2007)
Grasshopper Takeover, “Elephant Dreams” (2003)
The Hold Steady, “Almost Killed Me” (2004)
The Hush Sound, “So Sudden” (2005)
The Hush Sound, “Goodbye Blues” (2008)
Jack’s Mannequin, “Everything in Transit” (2005)
Jenny Owen Youngs, “Batten the Hatches” (2005)
Kanye West, “The College Dropout” (2004)
Kevin Devine, “Split the Country, Split the Street” (2005)
My Chemical Romance, “I Brought You My Bullets, You Brought Me Your Love” (2002)
My Chemical Romance, “Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge” (2004)
Ozma, “Rock and Roll Part Three” (2000)
Panic at the Disco, “Pretty. Odd.” (2008)
Say Anything, “…Is a Real Boy” (2004)
Something Corporate, “Leaving Through the Window” (2002)
The Spill Canvas, “Sunsets and Car Crashes” (2004)
The Spill Canvas, “One Fell Swoop” (2005)
The Starting Line, “Say It Like You Mean It” (2002)
The Starting Line, “Based on a True Story” (2005)
Taking Back Sunday, “Where You Want to Be” (2004)
Wait for Summer, “The History of an Error” (2005)
January 17th, 2010 at 1:05 am
Most of those too are from pre-2006. If you do a list in 2015 are you going to figure out a way to have all pre-2005 songs?
January 17th, 2010 at 1:06 am
Also- you put a self-made album on there? Ruins all of the legitimacy you never had…