Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Ambitious, mysterious and haunting., February 11, 2008
A transgendered fifty-something, Baby Dee used to ride around Manhattan on a tricycle playing her classical harp and performed as a "bilateral hermaphrodite" on Coney Island.
On her third studio album, the transsexual, classically trained harpist, former church organist and performance artist from Ohio manages to banish, in 49 mesmerising minutes, the dread memory of all the witless, pointless, worthless CDs that clog the charts and make one long for, rather than fear, the oft-heralded and apparently imminent death of the album.
The CD is a unsurprisingly unconventional affair, running formal, medievally tunes for recorder and strings into camp cabaret and beery Tom Waitsian clatter-alongs.
It comes as a radical change in direction. Produced by Will Oldham and journeyman multi-instrumentalist Matt Sweeney (Zwan, Johnny Cash, El-P), it sees Baby Dee switching to piano and adding extroversion to her songcraft, backed by a string section and some illustrious musicians (including Andrew WK on bass and drums).
With help from Will Oldham, Baby Dee fashions an intricate, skittish and poignant distillation of incidents, setbacks and triumphs from her life story, setting lyrics of documentary, allegory and allusion to music that shifts promiscuously from Broadway musicals to classical, from sea shanty to Weimar cabaret, delivered in a voice that yelps, growls, coos and howls.
Dee's yawping voice lurches from tender to theatrical, cunning to confessional, as she advises that there are harps inside pianos, girls inside boys, and that teeth are the only bones that show.
The album looks back at the mythical landscape of early childhood through the filter of Baby Dee's subsequent experiences.
This approach yields its most dramatic results in a song called "The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities", which begins with a couple of local characters called Bobby Slot and Freddy Weiss deciding to smash up their old upright piano.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about "Safe Inside the Day" is that the power of its songs and the extravagant humanity of its performances transcend even Baby Dee's incident-packed life story.
The exquisite title track somehow brings together the very different worlds of Tom Waits and Judy Garland.
"Safe Inside The Day" recalls John Cale; "The Earlie King" suggests Tom Waits; "Teeth Are The Only Bones That Show" has Dr John's boogie swagger. "Fresh Out Of Candles", meanwhile, could be off Lou Reed's "Transformer".
The darkly ribald "Big Titty Bee Girl(From Dino Town)" is the missing link between Bertolt Brecht and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And the whole album somehow manages to be beautiful and defiantly ugly at the same time.
But these influences are radically altered in a couple of ways.
By Baby Dee's bald, witty and poetic lyrics ("there's a harp inside that piano/and a girl inside that boy" she sings on "The Dance Of The Diminishing Possibilities").
And also by her extraordinary voice - a well-enunciated, declamatory style that sounds like a drunken vaudeville performer doing a Brecht opera.
It is not easy to find an album as ambitious, mysterious and haunting as this.
Maybe one of the best records of the first part of 2008.
Robin's Tiny Throat
Little Window
Stardom Road
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Emotional., February 12, 2008
Baby Dee is a New Yorker of indeterminate gender and this is an album which is unlikely to make for easy listening - especially, you might argue, if it's made by a 57-year-old former tree-feller and high-rise harpist with a voice somewhere between Shirley Temple/Judy Garland and Tom Waits.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1953, Baby Dee studied classical harp, worked as a church verger, changed gender from male to female, and pursued a career busking on the streets of Manhattan.
She left music, and retrained as a tree surgeon.
This last career was curtailed when a tree that Baby Dee was working on ended up wrecking someone's house. Tree surgery's loss, however, has been music's gain.
Baby Dee teamed up with like-minded mavericks like Marc Almond, Antony And The Johnsons, Current 93's David Tibet, playing her harp in small clubs and singing beautiful, introspective torch songs in a quavering tenor voice.
Baby Dee used to be a boy, and that is really what concerns "Safe Inside the Day", a songbook that details Dee's path from boyhood to torch singer.
The neighbourhood characters and streets that Dee grew up on become the canvas for this mythical re-imagining of her life.
The subjects of "The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities" are Bobby Slot and Freddy Weiss, who lived opposite Dee's childhood home. She describes in song how she once saw them bludgeoning a piano to pieces on the sidewalk with an axe.
The lyrics make clear that, for Dee, this event was symbolic of not only musical but personal revelation. "There's a harp inside that piano, there's a girl inside that boy", she coos, adding one crucial detail that hints at a childhood stymied by misplaced affections: "And my daddy's crowbars are his pride and joy".
Baby Dee describes her songs as 'born of necessity' and, though delivered with a rousing emotional clarity, many seem tinged with tragedy.
The songs are simultaneously worldly wise and innocent, literate and eloquent, but never artsy.
A case in point is "The Earlie King", a song inspired by Goethe's ruinous poem ('Der Erlkönig') about the final hallucinatory moments of a child dying in its father's arms.
Not all songwriters are poets but Baby Dee is.
Her shanty-like songs evoke Kurt Weill and the black humour of Nick Cave, a world of three- legged cats that dance, drunkeness, heartbreak and hangings. This won't be to all tastes but there's no denying a real force of nature here.
Surrounded by all this violence, comic and otherwise, Baby Dee remains safe inside her songs: robust vessels that steady a course through daydreams and nightmares crafted from storms of emotion.
"Safe Inside The Day" was produced by Matt Sweeney and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, who also played on the record, along with Andrew WK, Robbie Lee, Max Moston (Antony and the Johnsons), Bill Breeze (Psychic TV), John Contreras (Current 93), James Lo (Chavez) and Lia Kessel, all of whom bring extra fullness to Dee's old-world pop sensibilities.
Standouts : "The Earlie King" and "Big Titty Bee Girl (from Dino Town)".
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great songwriting, July 26, 2008
I don't care about Baby Dee's sex or background. I really don't. I bought this CD on the basis of having been knocked over by one of the songs played on the radio. The CD hasn't disappointed me. Every song is a work of art. A song about bees? Yeah, and it's not soppy or stupid either. A song about death? Yep, and it doesn't have a single cliche in it. Baby Dee has a great way with a lyric and is a fine fine composer and musician as well. His/her voice is a little weird sometimes, but somehow that works too. It's the most interesting thing I've bought in the last couple of years, and I buy a LOT of CDs. Baby Dee is a songwriter on the same level as Tom Waits. And like Waits, isn't afraid to write a heartbreakingly beautiful ballad now and then.
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~ Antony and the Johnsons
~ Little Annie
~ The Dirty Projectors
~ Antony and the Johnsons
~ The Felice Brothers
by Baby Dee 
