Daniela Gesundheit of Snowblink | Live on Sound Authors

February 20, 2009

Dr. Kent: That was a great track by a group called Snowblink. We’re going to play another gorgeous track at the end but right now we’re going to talk to Daniela Gesundheit of Snowblink. Welcome to the show.

Daniela G: Thank you.

Dr. Kent: Now I speak German so I will tend to pronounce it gezundheit.

Daniela G: I guess I would say gezunheit but I don’t speak German so!

Dr. Kent: Tell me about this record. I chatted of course with your fellow musician last week and another time and Dan Goldman and such a beautiful sound.

Daniela G: Oh well thank you, I appreciate that.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about the record and what you’re working on now.

Daniela G: Well we’re actually this record we finished a few months ago and we’re still working on putting it out officially but it was quite a process. We holed up in the studio in California for about a week and then went to a cabin in the eastern sierras and kept working on it and finished it up that way over the course of about five weeks.

Dr. Kent: The album is called Long Live. What’s that inspired by?

Daniela G: You know sometimes when I’m kind of in the process of finishing up a record I have my antennas out and I just wrote it down somewhere and I thought I liked the sound of long live and the meaning of it and we usually say long live (fill in the blank) so I liked the punctuated phrase like that.

Dr. Kent: Talk about the music a little bit. What I find so intriguing about it is that its got the same syrupy quality that I also saw in his music. Very much its got such a gorgeous flow to it. Do you sit home alone thinking of strings and electronics and things? Do you sit down and play the guitar and sing? How do you go about creating this stuff?

Daniela G: I usually work with guitar and mostly when I’m working on songs I’m mostly thinking about the words, the melody and the singing, its very vocally based for me and most of the other electronic and violin arrangements were worked on with the other musicians so with Jan Vincent or Caley Monahan Ward, they’re producer on the record. But when I’m just working on things alone I’m mostly using the voice and kind of playing with words.

Dr. Kent: Tell me about your history in music.

Daniela G: I didn’t train my voice until I was about 19 or so and I studied classical voice at the university so that was my only formal vocal training. I had about four years of that and I’ve studied music at university and I’ve studied experimental composition and I liked all the alternative music classes so that’s what I was drawn to.

Dr. Kent: When you say experimental composition, I actually have my PhD in new music and classical music composition. Is that what you mean, new music?

Daniela G: Yeah, I sang in a lot of recitals that would be in that category and the teachers I studied with were Anthony Baxter and Alvin Roussier. I don’t know if you know them.

Dr. Kent: I like both of their work actually.

Daniela G: Oh great, yeah.

Dr. Kent: And how does that sort of the alietory element of a lot of that music, how does that apply? Obviously it comes through your music and actually through Dan’s music also. What does it mean to you to not have Britney Spears coming out on the other end of the tape machine?

Daniela G: You mean you don’t hear Britney Spears in this music? Maybe I’m doing something wrong, I don’t know. No I don’t know I mean it is tough to quantify how those experiences and those studies come through but I guess its just the experience of working with those teachers and learning about their work and the work of the contemporaries; I guess it just forced me or encouraged me to keep a questioning mind or to not just find a form that works and write on that but to constantly pick apart my own approach. Its like I’ll come up with rules then I break them down myself.

Dr. Kent: Cool, so tell me a little bit about the two tracks I’m playing on the show. We listened to the Tired Bees, which is a fantastic title for a song and the next track we’ll listen to will be Rut and Nuzzle. Tell me about the tracks on the album.

Daniela G: The Tired Bees, the title I suppose is for a little while everyone was scared all the bees were dying off and they couldn’t figure out what was happening and what was causing it. I remember being upset about that so that’s where the title comes from but the song itself is just a tiny moment, like a microcosm sort of moment. The first line is one little breeze, just goes through and tries to find the tiny moments.

Dr. Kent: There’s a great thing on your website under your biography. It’s a clip of a little girl singing Kokomo. Is that you?

Daniela G: Yeah, that’s me.

Dr. Kent: So you have a great history as a rock and roll star here.

Daniela G: Yeah right! I was a little more shy then actually, a lot more shy but its true. I grew up in Los Angeles so I think somehow performances its all around in LA I guess and I grew up performing a little.

Dr. Kent: I sort of interrupted you there talking about the tracks on the album.

Daniela G: Oh sure. So Rut and Nuzzle, that song I suppose is about, it points to this idea, well if you think of the song talks about antlers, right? So if you think of antlers animals grow them and for awhile they can use them for combat and they’re really strong and anchored then after awhile they just fall out and their entirely useless to the animal. So this idea of the changing nature of things and how an object can have more than one use at different times. Just the changing nature of almost everything.

Dr. Kent: Awesome. How about the whole album; what does it mean to you? As a fellow musician, it’s a great thing to put the CD in the hands of a family member, but beyond that, the sort of lesser joys of releasing it to the public. What does this album mean to you? What does it say about you?

Daniela G: Well, I suppose I was living in San Francisco when I was writing those songs and very much in nature a lot. That city is really surrounded by nature so I think I was just observing, using memory and absorbing my surroundings and trying to assimilate all those things together. The record is kind of just a capturing of an era like my time over there and the experiences I had while I was out there.

Dr. Kent: Cool, well the group is called Snowblink and the album is called Long Live and we can find out more about the whole project at snowblink.org. I imagine you also have a MySpace?

Daniela G: Yeah, myspace\snowblink.

Dr. Kent: Wonderful, so we’re going to listen to the track Rut and Nuzzle. Its been a pleasure chatting with you and I look forward to hearing from you and Dan how things are going.

Daniela G: Thanks a lot its been fun.

Dr. Kent: Listen to Rut and Nuzzle from Snowblink; their new album just being released called Long Live. Listen to this.

[music]

Dr. Kent: That was a beautiful track from Snowblink called Rut and Nuzzle. Their new album is just being released; its called Long Live. We listened also to the track of the Tired Bees. We were talking to musician to Daniela Gezundheit of snowblink. Today on the show we chatted with the well acclaimed author of Yes We Can, a biography of Barack Obama with Garen Thomas. At the beginning of the show we talked to Jim Duzak, with Attorney at Love, and the third guest on the show was Nina Burleigh, the author of Unholy Business. See you next week on Friday again. This was an irregular schedule show this week to be on Wednesday and we’ll have three more authors and one more musician to chat with. Be safe and we’ll talk to you next week.

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