>>PREVIEW
ROB SZABO
Friday, August 11
Jackdaws
Think road trip. Think about travelling over 20,000 kilometres, crisscrossing the continent playing gigs from Fort St. John to San Francisco to New York. That describes singer-songwriter Rob Szabo’s 2005 North American tour schedule.
Szabo, (ex of Plasticine and The Groove Daddy’s, famous in the southern Ontario music scene), has just released his third solo CD Like a Metaphor, partly based on this extended road trip. Now it’s guaranteed that in putting 20,000 kilometres on your van and playing over 100 club dates, you’ll see a few sights, meet a few people and hopefully generate a few ideas. Then again, where do you find the time to turn the ideas into songs with that kind of schedule? Szabo laughs at the thought of it.
"A guy like Leonard Cohen will get up every day and write like for four hours or something, and I was thinking ‘wow that’s inspiring, I’d really like to live up to that kind of discipline so maybe I’ll achieve that at some point.’ I’d love to spend that kind of time (writing)," Szabo says. "It’s just right now I’m doing everything, you know, like I book my own tours. I actually drive myself around in the van, I’m producing my own records, writing."
Szabo did find time, however, to flesh out two ideas that came out of the road trip. One, based on people he met, titled the "Johnstown Kids," even inspired film footage in the DVD companion to Rob’s new album.
"I met them in Connecticut somewhere," Szabo says, "and we sort of struck up a friendship. Basically I tell the story in the song and I went back there and there’s this whole sort of community of people who are really passionate about music and that’s inspiring."
The other, "Incandescent," was about the trip itself, the miles on the highway. Rob laughs about this one.
" A song like ‘Incandescent,’ is sort of like I’m lonely, I’m on the road thinking about people at home kind of stuff. You know, stock singer-songwriter shit."
It’s worth noting though, that there’s nothing standard or stock about Szabo’s songwriting. This is most obvious when you consider that it’s often just Szabo and his guitar playing a small venue. In stripped-down setups like that, you either have the skills to hold the audience or you don’t – Szabo does, and he finds it inspiring, too.
"I’m mostly playing really small rooms – folk clubs and coffee houses and small theatres, so this is more like completely silent attentive audiences," he says. "You can do things dynamically and have more of a shared experience, I think, than with a big, loud rock show." |
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