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.
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.