Baby Dee's new album starts innocuously enough, with a quiet piano figure in waltz time. She starts to sing, something sweet about forgotten songs, and pretty soon Dee is chortling and whispering and soaring into her mezzo-soprano, sometimes in the span of a phrase, with cello and viola in tow. Will Oldham's voice is quavering in the background. The melody sounds like it came from the Middle Ages, or the Delta. It shifts gently, and madly, somehow making all kinds of sense.
Dee has built her own temple of beauty and power, out of notes and words. "If I can remain there I will stay," she sings on "Safe Inside the Day," the album's opening song and title track, "and I will live another day."
She's done a lot of living so far. Dee is an utterly unclassifiable musician, a harpist, accordion player, pianist, and singer whose winding path has taken her to St. Jerome's Church in the Bronx, where she was music director for a decade; and the Coney Island sideshows, where she appeared as the Bilateral Hermaphrodite; and the street, where she lashed her harp to the back of a 6-foot tricycle to give strolling lovers the beautiful song the universe owes them.
But the blackest corners of Dee's life - sooty nooks filled with frightful snapshots of the Cleveland street where she grew up - are documented on her new, fourth album in a trio of songs that she never imagined would see the light.
"I didn't want to do it," Dee says from England, where she is re cording with David Tibet. "The lyrics are so dark. I was living in a world where 'Teeth Are the Only Bones That Show,' and I was 'Fresh Out of Candles' and doing 'The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities.' I couldn't help writing those songs, but there was no law I had to put them out in the world. Will talked me into it. He encouraged me to go face first into the ugliness and trust there would be humor and fun and I wouldn't be alone."
Indie auteur Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie "Prince" Billy, coproduced Dee's album with Matt Sweeney. They gathered a crack group of musicians that includes Andrew WK and members of Antony and the Johnsons, Current 93, and Chavez to craft the music's chamber-cabaret sound.
"I've never heard more beautiful music than Dee's," says Andrew WK, "or music that comes from a place so direct and pure. It's otherworldly."
A few recording sessions later, Oldham played those troubled songs for Dee, newly adorned in their whimsical, elegant settings.
"All of a sudden I was given a context," recalls Dee, who plays Sunday at the Lily Pad. After that the collection felt more like a family gathering, she says, than a closet full of skeletons. "Every family has its unruly children and crabby uncle and hateful aunts and kindly grandmother and angry father. Some are impossible, but it's OK for them to be there."
The songs are biting, a pungent fusion of bitter memory and dawning discovery, and Dee names names. Bobby Slot and Freddy Weiss lived across the street from her, and they really did take an axe to their upright piano on the front lawn, exposing the indestructible stringed instrument hidden inside. Dee's father actually collected crowbars, and he rubbed them. So when she sings a line like, "There's a harp inside that piano/ There's a girl inside that boy/ And my daddy's crowbars are his pride and joy" - over a saucy little soft-shoe, no less - Dee's life flashes before us.
And that provokes curiosity about her back story, in particular the part about being transgender. Such inquiries, we quickly learn, are a bore.
"Here we go. Every road leads to the same place, and I end up talking about the whole trip of being a tranny and making the big change," Dee says. "Everybody wants to know about my life history, and it ends up being a string of amusing anecdotes, but for a life it's just this crazy disconnected stupidity. I know I'm not the only ruptured one, and I don't mind talking about it. I just hate the fact that I can't make sense of it."
Dee studied piano as a child but always dreamed of playing the harp, and she saved enough money to buy one when she was 20. Then came a series of obsessions in which Dee immersed herself to the exclusion of everything else - first with developing an avant-garde improvisational style on harp, then with Gregorian music, and after that with the music of the Renaissance.
"I wasn't even particularly religious," Dee says. "In my mind I wished to be an anonymous monk writing a magnificent melody. But I couldn't and I didn't and I ended up getting a church gig, for which I was perfectly, inadvertently qualified. I thought I'd found my niche."
But Dee abandoned the church (or the other way around) when she abandoned the pretense of being a man. After completing her gender transformation, Dee returned to street performance in New York and began appearing on the neo-vaudeville circuit with the Bindlestiff Family Cirkus and the Kamikaze Freak Show. In 1999 she moved back to Cleveland to care for her ailing parents, and that's when she started writing the songs that would comprise her remarkable recorded catalog.
Seeing Dee perform moved Amanda Palmer of the Dresden Dolls to write a song called "The Living Room," which begins: "Forty-seven strings are pulled by this angelic beaten girl/ And it breaks our hearts to hear the music that comes out of her/ Shoulders hang on folded chairs/ This will be our church tonight/ We have dug our foxholes here/ Not an atheist in sight."
"I still try to describe her to people, and I always ruin it," Palmer says. "It can come off sounding really campy, and it's not. You're taken from sobbing to laughter in 30 seconds and it feels right."
The unlikely success of Dee's good friend Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), another powerfully unusual musician, offers hope that Dee may reach an audience beyond in-the-know fringe dwellers. Andrew WK has faith that "anyone who likes melody and personality and performance, anyone who has the faith and courage to open their mind to music, will find their way to Dee." And she's ready for them.
"It's mostly young people who like the idea of the underground. If you're going to sing and write songs," Dee says, "somebody's got to hear them."
