Album Notes

The Szabo Songbook is the first album from Vancouver, B.C.'s Heartbreak Scene, but as the title suggests, it's a self-effacing debut. In 2003, singer Marcy Emery (The Choir Practice, Capozzi Park) called some of her friends together to record interpretations of songs by another friend, Mark Szabo.

Multi-instrumentalist John Collins (producer of Tegan and Sara and producer/member of The New Pornographers) was one enlistee, along with his New Pornos bandmate Dan Bejar, whose other project is the brilliant, sui generis Destroyer.

All involved were huge fans of Szabo's and thought the Vancouver-based songwriter's work deserved wider attention. For years Szabo had been mixing ramshackle arrangements with sophisticated melodies and surgically precise lyrics, both solo and with his now defunct band Good Horsey.

Imagine an autodidact songwriter as attuned to down-and-out humanity as Springsteen, only far subtler than the Boss and steeped in art pop from the ESP-
DISK label through Slapp Happy all the way to Drag City, with songs that are off-handed in execution but very, very deliberate in composition, and you're getting the right idea about Mark Szabo.

Marcy Emery and Heartbreak Scene tease out Szabo's melodies and hooks, and the improved recording fidelity holds a jeweler's loupe to the carefully wrought lyrics. Many of Szabo's characters are desperate for someone to salvage them, but defiant about their need for salvaging. The same might be said for the songs themselves, and on The Szabo Songbook, Heartbreak Scene answer that conflicted call with grace and ingenuity.