Daniela Gesundheit is her own words. She is her own fragrance and her own body of water. She is her own grid and flight pattern — her own wingspan and appetite. She’s found a way to be made of skin and made of feathers. She breathes air and expels it in the same condition, not altering its composition, making sure that what she gives back is helpful to someone else who might need it. She is her very own darting sight and dawning, vibrant understanding. As Snowblink, she is snowy day, rainy night and they are embalmed by her free-spirited words which act as snow globes, erecting soothing, controlled rainy nights and snowy days inside others — brethren, giving the feelings identical twins and watching them sway together, holding mitted hands and sharing umbrellas, or just splashing torrentially. Her way is not steeped in reluctance, but in the assured ceremony of needing to discover the inner-most workings of the life and lives that we’re surrounded by to get to the center of what we ourselves are becoming and what we could, one day, potentially manifest as or graduate to. … [Story Continues Below]

First song
Green to Gone (Snowblink) [3.03MB] [1131 downloads]


— unreleased
You know, friends take road trips and make promises. It’s nobody’s fault really, and turns out the promises are far better un-kept.  This is, in the end, a leaf song, which is so apt as we are in that charged time when all anyone can think about in certain parts of the world, like where I am, are those leaves.  My friend Max described his tomato harvest as holding the “heat of a hundred days;” right now, with all of our trees red-and-yellowing, our summer is being displayed, flaunted really, before it is dropped entirely (and always the resultant heart-break, we won’t learn).  These last lines are pointing to something a bit different, however; they reference times of feast, and then famine, and then that difficult event of something ending in its prime. When we are not allowed to watch something wane, when instead it is plucked, it forever remains disproportionately dear.

Lyrics:
When I’m twenty-two
when it’s two-thousand-four
when you’re twenty-four
meet me Big Sur

you dress in denim from your neck to your knees
you turn your back to the bossy bossy breeze
a plane goes by silenced by hiss of rip-tide
sea salty-watering me

when I’m twenty-six
when it’s two-thousand-eight
when you’re twenty-eight
meet me Montana

it’s a gonna be a sweet the-end
or a no, no it’s too, too late
or a my, my, my oh! how I’ve missed
the way your way makes me make me me

sometimes the leaves succulently
sometimes the leaves poisoning
sometimes they go from green to gone

Second song
Stand Where A Fruit Tree Drops The Things It Doesn't Need (Snowblink) [4.32MB] [1030 downloads]


– unreleased
To stray not even an inch from tree imagery, here we stand by a fruit tree (in the guided visualization format of this song, this tree can be any form of drupe or fruit-bearing variety that you might desire) and wait. And wait. And wait until it gives us what we want, dammit.
Why membrillo? It is the quince fruit, inedible unless cooked for many hours. My father grew up on a quince orchard in Mexico, and I have stories about him shooting pigeons, stealing candy, and dragging a watermelon up into a membrillo tree and eating the entire thing until he became ill.

Lyrics:
If there is something you want, don’t ask
if there is something you want
if there is something you want

those folded fingers are nests
they swell with blessings
out fly blessed things
those folded fingers are nests
those folded fingers are nests

Third song
Three Prayers For Unsensation Resurrection (Snowblink) [3.18MB] [993 downloads]


— unreleased
This is a set of three songs, though we have only included the first two “movements.” I finished these songs in Hawaii during an accidental sabbatical. For five days, I got up before dawn and walked down the beach to a dark cave and carved at the songs until the sun rose. It was so scary! Caves and the dark! More than enough scary-time to go around. Sea Change mentions grey whales; they were migrating past Hawaii from Alaska to breed and spawn. In addition to getting to hear them singing underwater (!!!!!) here is what I learned about grey whales on that trip: there is nothing to eat in warm water for them, so the average female loses about 20,000 pounds in the mating season. Her milk for her young is the consistency of cottage cheese, and causes her calf to gain 8 pounds an hour. Her lungs are the size of limousines. She can and does mate with any number of males, but she can decide which sperm to let in to fertilize her. You must meet them sometime, they are the best!

Lyrics:
i.    sea change

I write you on the tongues of bells
I write you on the broken plates
I write you in a stormy hand:
a cursive culled from gulls and ampersand

it’ll look like underwater
it’ll feel warm like Alabama
to come bearing gifts of flood to douse our desert borders
gifts of Bering land bridge to walk our sea-legs homeward

oh the tired that feet and bones can grow
on a road paved over undertow
oh the lengths that grace will make me go
are as great as eight grey whales full grown
you’re the prayer I wouldn’t dare intone

ii.  none

if a father can’t bless all his children then none will be blessed
if his hand reaches out for a forehead no longer in flesh
yes and none, oh none, oh none

All songs performed by
Daniela Gesundheit . . . lead vocals, electric and acoustic guitar
Dan Goldman . . . piano, nylon guitar, electric guitar

All songs written by Daniela Gesundheit, and appear on LONG LIVE, 2008.  Pre-release copies available through our website snowblink.org

Absorption is her choice of growth, embracing the very elements that could be doing the same thing in a silent way and in a pattern that couldn’t be charted out. It’s discovered and inherited, voluntary and the opposite, you see. None of it requires excessive thinking, just living, just handling. We could start with Gesundheit taking in the stories of her father’s youth, growing up in Mexico. She recalls his tales of shooting pigeons, stealing candies and running up a membrillo tree and eating so much damned watermelon that he made himself sicker than a dog. Hearing stories like these – and it’s plain logic to believe that there are hundreds more just like them from where they came from – has impacted the way that the young Californian filters her own experiences and imagining the experiences of the animals and other living creatures that surround her. With certainty, when she was learning about the mating habits of whales near Hawaii, no where in the information that she read or was given did it specifically compare the size of the female whales lungs to limousines, nor did it suggest that the female whale’s milk was the consistency of cottage cheese, but these very vivid examples of interpolation and registering are how Gesundheit has formed her second nature. On the songs that she plays here with Dan Goodman (a superb session with him is forthcoming soon) as support, Ms. Snowblink is as majestic as she’s ever been, cascading out of the pinkened skies of crisp air that smells of apples and orange rinds and dried gourds and casting her words in crystalline brilliance. She portrays the act of maturity with a child’s wonder – almost. For children, growing up is a treat and a mysterious one, but when it’s already happened, the thought turns to, “What just happened?” Everyone is forced into aging, as she remarks in recognition of the suddenly dormant trees, dropping all of their papery and rainbow-y leaves like towels and confetti. There are promises amongst friends – with bellies full of giddy dreams and endless opportunity — that are forgotten or passed over, foolishly and sometimes without the remorse that they should be shown. Aging and becoming the people that it seems destiny could be persuading, sometimes feels like a rip-off, unless the focus can be taken from everything-starts-dying-the-day-it-was-born mentality and trying to plug numbers into the equation to figure out its finer points and maybe coming up with some kind of working solution, where we can be those reluctant trees, dying a little every fall, wallowing every winter and being reborn when the weather starts to heat up again. Gesundheit’s music on every Snowblink song is like coming out of a depression, with deeper meaning, finally attuned to what you’re hoping to get out of this crazy business of taking in air and letting it run your parts. You still – despite any fatal breakdown – should be able to feel that blood of yours moving through you like sap and maple syrup, slow enough to remind you to look around, cause you’re not all the way dead yet.
  

Snowblink Tour Dates:
OCTOBER 

  • 16th — AWESOME FARM, TIVOLI, NY – 8 p.m. w/Dead Western, Luxury Pond
  • 17th — EARTH HOUSE, WESLEYAN UNIVERSITY, MIDDLETOWN, CT – 8:30 p.m. w/ Belly Boat, Julianna Barwick, Viking Moses
  • 18th — LOMPOC CAFE & BREW PUB, BAR HARBOR, ME w/ Dead western
  • 19th — STRANGE MAINE, PORTLAND, ME w/ Dead Western, Cursillitas
  • 20th — 2 GOVERNMENT ST., KITTERY, ME – 9 pm w/ dead western, nat baldwin
  • 21st — STAIRWELL GALLERY, PROVIDENCE, RI w/ annikki dawn, DEAD WESTERN
  • 24th — GOLDEN WEST CAFÉ, BALTIMORE, MD – 10 p.m. w/ Twins, Dead Western 
  • 25th — MERIDIAN COFFEE HOUSE, WILLIAMSBURG, VA w/ Dead Western + Luxury Pond 
  • 26th  — SPEAKERTREE RECORDS, LYNCHBURG, VA — 7PM w/ Dead Western
  • 27th — TWISTED BRANCH TEA BAZAAR, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA w/ DEAD WESTERN
  • 29th — EMILY’S HOUSE, TBA, PHILADELPHIA, PA w/ Luxury Pond, Emily Rabkin Reading
  • 30th – ZEBULON, BROOKLYN, NY w/ CHARLIE LOOKER, JULIANNA BARWICK, SAM BUCK ROSEN
    NYC ALBUM RELEASE! 

NOVEMBER

  • 4TH — TRISTAN’S HOUSE, 106 NASH HILL ROAD, WILLIAMSBURG, MA — 6:30 PM w/ LUXURY POND, KURT WEISMAN

Snowblink’s Original Daytrotter Session