Safe Inside the Day

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

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.

› Go to Amazon U.S. to see both reviews  4.5 out of 5 stars