Glazed with a coating of early December snow, Gwen Snyder’s brick Victorian two-story in Saugerties could almost be a gingerbread house. But instead of breadcrumbs, one follows a freshly trodden path around the back to the converted mudroom. Inside, the coal-haired nymph-princess brews up a steaming cup of chai while her fluffy-furred “children”—two boy cats, Zumi and Ollie, and Ruby Sunshine, a burly female Akita—stay close to her busy ankles. In the adjacent candle-glowing parlor Snyder has left her vintage Hammond rhythm generator running, and the machine taps out a slow, hypnotic tempo that echoes through the house like a watery heartbeat.
“Sorry,” the petite hostess says, clicking off the device and offering a spot on the davenport. “I was working on a new song. I think I’m gonna call my next album Sound Doilies. There’s also an album called Tempest in a Teacup. I recorded that one a while back but it hasn’t been released.” Somehow all of this 21st-century Lewis Carol whimsy makes perfect sense. After all, this isn’t just Snyder’s home; it’s also the magical domain of Blueberry.
Blueberry is Snyder’s ongoing “band” concept, a project that has released three albums of sultry, psychedelic pop-soul on the singer and multi-instrumentalist’s own The Shaz Records, offerings well described in her press bio as “Erykah Badu, Prince, and Donovan making sweet love to the sounds of Stevie Wonder’s Innervisions and Roxy Music’s Avalon. A landscape where quiet storms hover and glide over endless fields of deep, funky hooks.” A reliably shape-shifting concern, Blueberry manifests itself in incarnations that range from just the singer and her electric piano to the slamming, horn-augmented six-piece that played Chronogram’s 2006 Halloween party, a triumphant set dancers continue to rave about.
Ah, Halloween. Open season on reinventing oneself. Most leave it behind when they hit puberty to follow the die-cut trajectory of the “straight” world. But for more creative types it leaves the indelible taste of delicious possibility. “When I was a little girl growing up in Oswego, the town historian was this very austere woman who had really long hair that she usually wore in braids,” Snyder remembers. “But on Halloween, she would unbraid it, let it hang all loose and scraggly, and dress up like a witch. And instead of just handing out candy, she would attach it to the outside of her house. You would walk up and pull it off the side of the house, like the house was made of candy. She was also the local theater director and she cast me in a production of ‘Miracle on 34th Street,’ which was my first play. That was a pivotal moment.”
Though Snyder was singing not long after she could open her mouth (“My dad tells me I used to sing disco songs in my high chair”), she also started playing music at a very young age, although not by choice. “My mom made me start taking piano lessons when I was five, but I hated it,” says Snyder. “She told me I had to stick with it at least until I was a teenager, which I did. But as soon I turned 13, I said ‘That’s it, I quit!’ and started playing bass instead. Of course I’m really glad I learned piano now, and I really appreciate my folks making me learn—even though I never actually learned music theory.”
By 14, Snyder was into heavy metal (“I had every Led Zeppelin album on cassette; KISS and AC/DC, too.”) and playing in a band of like-minded, mostly older high schoolers. “There was a lot of hairspray, a lot of Spandex,” she says with a laugh and a barely detectable wince. “That’s just what people were into [in Oswego]. The singer from Anthrax [Joey Belladonna] and Ronnie James Dio both lived up around there.”
But it was the footlights, not the flashpots, that led Snyder to New York in the 1990s. “There was no arts program at all in my high school, but I had written a play slamming the school administration. Kind of a utopian society story, with a minimal, all-black set,” recalls Snyder. “And I was really lucky, because someone from NYU came up to see it and they liked it enough for me to be accepted into the experimental theater program [at NYU].” While at the Manhattan college she also studied music therapy and began to immerse herself in the Lower East Side’s famously radical theater scene, providing the voice of Janis Joplin’s ghost in the Off-Broadway production “Distortion Taco,” working with illustrious composer-choreographer Meredith Monk, and starring in several experimental and indie films.
In 1998, the next turning point came when Snyder met guitarist Kenny Siegel, who was in need of a bassist for his band Johnny Society. Already a fan, Snyder quickly learned the songs and joined the group, a rocking outfit with whom she periodically still performs. Choice vocal session jobs with composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and others also helped get her name around, but at the end of the day Snyder wasn’t wholly satisfied. She needed an outlet for the more sophisticated, groove-based soul and light funk songs she’d been writing on her own time. Siegel encouraged her to try out her ideas on the vintage keyboards in his Brooklyn studio, and, after an aborted first album, Snyder and a handful of musician friends recorded Blueberry’s official debut, Twilight (1999).
Snyder and Siegel rented a getaway house in Chichester for a year before moving their upstate quarters to Catskill, where Siegel opened Old Soul Studios, the site of ill-fated cult songster Chris Whitley’s final sessions. Still commuting between the Hudson Valley and her New York apartment, Snyder cut the tracks for 2003’s Have Another Pillow, a dreamlike Shuggie Otis-meets-Mother Goose excursion packaged with an appropriately outré “animated storybook” DVD.
During a freelance backing-vocal date in Bearsville, Snyder met engineer Mark McKenna, the future maven of Shokan’s world-renowned Allaire Studios, which led to still more vocal session jobs, this time with jazz great Don Byron and others. “[Snyder] is a true original, and one of the most soulful and versatile musicians I know,” says McKenna, who has worked with such platinum-magnets as Sting, Bruce Springsteen, and U2. “There really aren’t a lot of people who can play everything from the kind of rock-solid bass she does in Johnny Society to the Burt Bacharach-inspired pop tunes she writes for Blueberry.”
Such versatility as a musician has certainly come in handy over the last few years. Snyder and her pet rabbit, Merlin the Magic Bunny (who, sadly, recently passed away), moved into the Saugerties house in 2005. In the interim, touring slots on bass and keyboards with Soul Asylum’s Dave Pirner, ex-Brand New Heavies singer N’Dea Davenport, David Bowie bassist Gail Ann Dorsey, Brooklyn band Nervous Cabaret, and singer-songwriters Ben Taylor, Jonathan Rice, and Joseph Arthur have all helped to offset the mortgage while the singer works on furthering her own profile. She’s definitely found her nest. “I was really taken in by the whole music-community vibe when I first visited the area from New York,” Snyder says. “There are so many incredible musicians up here, and it’s really great to meet and play with them.”
Ex-Gang of Four and sometime B-52s bassist Sara Lee, who lives in Olivebridge, is one of those incredible musicians. A funk-rock player of world-beating caliber, Lee was blown away when she stumbled upon a set by Blueberry at a Woodstock block party a couple of years back. “I just remember thinking, ‘Where did this creature come from?’” the British expat says and laughs. Lee’s playing and Snyder’s music were a natural fit, and it wasn’t long before Lee became the first-call bassist for shows by Blueberry’s expanded permutations. “I really haven’t heard or played with anyone quite like [Snyder],” Lee says. “Her songs and her playing always have a really strong groove and her arrangements are high-quality and very creative. She’s totally authentic.”
Early last year, Snyder released Blueberry’s most stunningly cohesive disc to date, the sublime Organika. Bearing such infectious treasures as the loping-groove workout “Fickle” and the propulsive mover “Grubby Wire,” the album is a true embarrassment of neosoul riches. (Snyder has shot videos for two of Organika’s tracks, the mysterious opener, “The Little Ones,” and the Lolita-coy ballad “I Adore You”; the latter clip, filmed in the vocalist’s garage, depicts her in the company of a gang of Dickensian puppets.) The record saw loud appreciation in music publications and locally, but keeping up with the promotions end proved to be more than Snyder could handle as she wrote new songs, played side gigs, and held down a day job. All of which makes what happened next worthy of a Hollywood screenplay.
One night, as Snyder was waiting tables at a popular Catskill restaurant, a co-worker pointed out one of the eatery’s regulars and mentioned that he was “in the music business.” The diner turned out to be Bob Irwin, the president of Coxsackie-based reissue label Sundazed Music and an audio engineer who regularly oversees remastering projects for Sony Music and has worked on box sets by Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and The Byrds, as well as other archive releases. (Irwin and Sundazed were profiled in the September 2006 issue of Chronogram.) Not expecting much but always happy for a new pair of ears, Snyder handed Irwin a copy of Organika and her contact info as he was leaving and said goodbye.
According to Snyder, Irwin called the next day to say that when he played the disc in his car on the way home he was so affected that he had to pull over, going on to say he had listened to it three more times in full that evening. He told her that he was interested in starting a new wing of the label to feature contemporary artists, and asked if she’d like to be its debut act. Cue pixie-dust glissando: Retitled Blueberry, with Snyder reverting to her own name as the artist, the album formerly known as Organika will be re-released worldwide in February. It could only be a storybook fairytale.
“Actually, I do live in a fairytale,” says the bewitching pop maiden. “I really wish it was easier for me to exist in the real world. But it’s such a challenge trying to do that. Fairytales are so much better.”
Blueberry by Gwen Snyder will be released through Sundazed Music in February. The band Blueberry will perform at Backstage Studio Productions in Kingston on February 2 and at the Living Room in Manhattan on January 10. www.blueberrylounge.com.
Gwen Snyder will be playing at the Colony Cafe in Woodstock with the Laura Pepitone Show on Sunday, January 6. (845) 679-5342; www.colonycafe.com.
This article appears in January 2008.
