Baby Dee – Safe Inside The Day
Ohio has spawned some great musical eccentrics. But with her lopsided yet robust singing style, Cleveland native Baby Dee might just as well seem to hail from Mars or Narnia to the uninitiated. Where else do transgender, fifty-something singing harpists call home? (New York City, actually — and Dee spent many years there, too, working as a musical director at a Catholic church and as a Coney Island sideshow attraction.) Inspired by childhood, her third full-length album looks back but also offers a way forward: With Safe Inside The Day, this unusual talent arrives at a sound that could introduce her gifts to wider audiences.
Sympathetically produced by Bonnie “Prince” Billy (alias Will Oldham) and Matt Sweeney, the disc features fuller arrangements than those found on her earlier albums. A string trio underscores her piano on the opening title tune, while clarinet lines swim through the bluesy, spectral “Fresh Out Of Candles”. A few instrumentals further explore the possibilities of this expanded palette: Tooting recorders impart a distinctly medieval air to “A Christmas Jig For A Three-Legged Cat”, while intertwined accordion and saxophone on “Bad Kidneys” evoke pre-Broadway Kurt Weill.
When Dee fully unleashes her theatrical voice, ripe with plumy enunciation and bizarre shifts of tone, the lurching “The Earlie King” and “The Dance Of Diminishing Possibilities” (skewed glimpses of her father and childhood chums, respectively) vibrate with idiosyncratic glee. And with its knee-slapping lyrics about tormenting albinos, the boozy “Big Titty Bee Girl” makes Randy Newman’s “Short People” seem PC in comparison. Folks who go ga-ga for contemporary innovators such as Joanna Newsom, Antony, and CocoRosie will find much to savor in these eleven originals.