Baby Dee
Issue #35
Safe Inside the Day (Drag City)
By Claire Evans
Published: March 1st, 2008 | 1:45pm
Sometimes music is unlikely. In fact, a large part of the pleasure of writing reviews is that occasionally you fall ass-backward onto an album that is so self-assured in its mind-boggling unlikeliness that it makes the whole palaver seem worthwhile again.
Take Baby Dee, for example. She's a 50-something transgender performance artist, former church organist, and classically trained harpist with a carrot mop-top of unruly curls. She's a born-and-bred Cleveland street-performing legend, and she numbers among her friends and collaborators such luminaries as Antony, Andrew W.K., Bonnie “Prince” Billy, and Matt Sweeney. The list of unlikely characteristics doesn't end there, though, because the second you pop Safe Inside the Day, Baby Dee's Drag City debut, in your CD player, the astonishment starts all over again.
Dee's music is an unprecedented hybrid of gravelly Tin Pan Alley crooning and morose, devastating piano-bar theatrics; it would sound like it came from another decade entirely if it wasn't so consummately weird. It's beyond old world — it's otherworldly. Although there are moments when Dee’s ribald, Prohibition-era stomp verges on grating (as with the depends-on-your-mood "The Only Bones That Show"), these are amply counterbalanced by the album's standout tracks: the strange, ornate blues of "Fresh Out Of Candles," which marries off-pitch backup vocals, withering strings, and tons of conflicting tones into one narrative, or the shadowy, subtle piano balladry of "Flowers On the Tracks.” At its best, Baby Dee’s undeniably uncanny vocal cadence stretches and roars over the bar-room production of her plunky piano lines.
Safe Inside The Day is so floridly weird that it will certainly face severe judgment in the press (to wit, I’ve read more than one negative review, one going to far as to call the album “hooey”), but there is something special, almost sacred, about music that is so uncompromising. It’s this purity of vision, especially in an industry so dominated by uniformity, that will earn Dee her most glowing praise — and deservedly so.
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