Former Horsey Honcho Masters Musical Economy
Georgia Straight October 2000 (?)
by Shawn Conner
Considering the number of songs on his solo debut that are about different occupations, Mark Szabo appears to be on his way to becoming a musical Studs Terkel for his generation. “At one point I was thinking of including even more occupation songs,” says the singer, who is sitting outside a Commercial Drive coffee establishment on a sunny afternoon. “But the song about tree-planting just didn’t cut it.”Instead, Chocolate Covered Bad Things finds Szabo dispensing career advice and singing about cops, pilots, lawyers, and soap actresses. Not that the 33-year-old–who, when not writing songs or playing with his regular band, the five-piece Capozzi Park, earns a living waiting tables-has any desire to pursue any of the careers he mentions on the 17-track CD. Even the autobiographical-seeming “Cop”, which contains both a melodic nod to Neil Young’s coming-of-age classic “Sugar Mountain” and lines about growing up to be “on the scene of the crime”, is fiction. “Personal experience is in it, but it’s always a story,” he says.Szabo came to local prominence as a member of Good Horsey, a trio that also included Justice Schanfarber and current Capozzi Park drummer Max Lee. Coming from the post-Pavement side of the indie-rock tracks, Good Horsey released two tapes, a few singles, and one full-length CD (Kazue) during its nearly three-year life span.Chocolate Covered Bad Things is a collection of songs Szabo wrote after the band’s 1995 breakup. Like most of Good Horsey’s output, Chocolate Covered Bad Things is a lo-fi project, recorded mostly on 4-track and 8-track recorders and released simply under the name Mark. The first version of the record didn’t go over so well with the owner of Catsup Plate Recordings, the Pennsylvania-based label that had requested a CD’s worth of material from Szabo. “He said, ‘I’m not too sure about this” says Szabo. “So I added some new songs and remastered others. I don’t think he liked the unfinished aspect of it.”The finished product is the album to beat for local tunesmiths. Like American songwriter Bill Callahan of Smog, Szabo is a master of the trenchant, economical lyric line; he can write painfully sad, minimalist songs without resorting to cliche or sentiment. For instance, on “By a Nose”, he manages to wring a broken friendship’s worth of misery out of the lines “You can stay until you find a place” and “Three in this apartment not comfortable for two.” As demonstrated by the obsessive “I Should Be With You”, he also has Callahan’s ability to sound a little scary, as if proper socialization hasn’t quite taken hold.”Daytime Emmy” is told from the point of view of a soap actress “selling garbage to trash” and is sung with perfect fragility by Capozzi Park member Marcy Emery, who also sings backup on a few other tunes and contributes her own lilting “Rome”.Szabo’s next release will be with Capozzi Park, nut interested parties can hear Chocolate Covered Bad Things material when the group-one of the best pop bands the city has to offer-plays the Brickyard on October 24. In fact, Chocolate Covered Bad Things–which careens from the opening rave-up, “Go For the Thrill”, to noisy jokes such as “Viper” and the exquisite, spare pop of “Alibi” and “Rome”–is something of a group effort. Because all the Park members play on the CD, Szabo admits there were some beer-fuelled questions from his bandmates about why the record wasn’t a full-fledged Capozzi Park CD. “I’d think about it, then two minutes later someone would say ‘I think we shouldn’t have done this song, and we should have included a different version of that one,'” says Szabo. “At that point, I would say ‘That’s why it’s not a Capozzi Park record.'”
Listen to “Chocolate Covered Bad Things” by Mark here .
