The Enchanted Dollhouse

Gwen Snyder's Blueberry

by Peter Aaron and photographs by Fionn Reilly, December 21, 2007

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.