The Stool Pigeon music newspaper

Safe Inside the Day, Baby Dee’s remarkable new album, is haunted by her father and a boyhood long since gone.

“At one point I was actually afraid that I was being possessed by my father’s ghost,” she says. “There’s a lot of angry, bitter stuff going on that I associate with my father that I don’t associate with myself. Because, of course, I’m far too nice to be angry and bitter, heheheh!”

Baby Dee’s filthy, joyful laugh is one of many distinctive things about this 54-year-old transsexual harpist, former Coney Island freakshow and New York street performer. Another is that she’s made an album that’s dark and uplifting in equal measures, full of hope and loss, redemption and disillusionment, existential revelation and religious wonderment. Oh, and there’s a song about tying a sausage to an albino’s penis.

A unique piece of work, it owes nothing to contemporary rock music but hovers closer to classical and vaudeville traditions, Kurt Weill, Antony and the Johnsons (with whom Dee has collaborated), Marc Almond (who has covered her songs), and Will Oldham, who produced and played on the record with Matt Sweeney.

The album’s second track, ‘The Earlie King’, is a darkly surreal number based on Goethe’s poem ‘Der Erlkonig’. “As a child I had piano lessons, and that was one of the things I had to play,” Dee says of Schubert’s famous musical setting for the poem. “And my father became obsessed with that song. He always wanted me to play it. And that starts to get really spooky because there’s a whole family history there, of death and my father which, you know, we don’t need to go into here.”

We do go into it: Dee had an older brother who died before she was born, a tragedy that parallels the subject matter of Goethe’s original poem.

“The idea for me, for that song, was the imaginary, unreal thing having real consequences in the world,” she says. “If you think of a very bad thing that happens and then you try to find out why, it will lead you to something completely imaginary. It’s a Chimera - it’s a nothing, but having horrible, real consequences… To me, all the truly scary things are always like, nobody there.”

In 1972 Dee left her native Cleveland, aged 18, to become a portrait painter in New York before an obsession with Gregorian music led to a job directing a church choir. “I got a great job in a great church and I never played any crap at all,” she boasts. “I never even played a Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria’ until 10 years later, when I was using it to finance my sex change.”

Returning to Cleveland in 1999, she began writing songs seriously for the first time, sending demos to her friend Antony Hegarty, hoping that he might cover them. Instead, he sent them on to David Tibet of Current 93, who released them on his
Durtro label.

“I never thought of myself as a singer,” Dee says. “I mean, I was a street singer, but that was like, make ’em laugh, get their money and go. It wasn’t part of the plan to break anybody’s heart. I learned how to perform by dancing naked on a bar, trying to get a buck out of the leg humpers.”

Safe Inside the Day also features a surprisingly low-key turn from one Andrew WK, on bass and occasional drums.

“Wow, people don’t have a clue what goes on there,” Dee says of the man responsible for gonzo classics ‘Party Hard’ and I Get Wet. “He is one of the best musicians I’ve ever met. He sits down at the drums and whatever he does comes out sounding like the best drummer in the world, you know, on a good day! He plays the bass, same deal. It’s the best. And he played the piano - my god, absolutely incredible. His playing just knocked me over - it is so good.” Dee leans conspiratorially towards me. “And he’s got this whole life that he’s famous for that I don’t know anything about! Heheheh!”

And that laugh echoes through the bar again, like water flowing through every drain in the world, but still coming out clear.