Cabaret music can be played as camp or played as kitsch, but it's best when it's played straight. Not that Baby Dee cares much about playing it straight. A loud and proud transgender performance artist, Baby Dee's a self proclaimed former "traveling hermaphrodite" who spent time working a Coney Island freak show (a family show, she says) before ditching New York and returning to her home town of Cleveland, where, if you believe her autobiographical press notes, she ran a tree removal service (imagine being on the receiving end of that service call). It was there that fan Will Oldham came knocking, rescuing Baby Dee from can't-pay-the-bills obscurity.
Oldham wasn't exactly calling blind, however. A friend of Antony Hegarty, Baby Dee also found support from early Antony benefactor and Oldham pal David Tibet (of Current 93). Tibet had released Antony's debut on his Durtro label, and he would do the same for several of Baby Dee's recordings. In Cleveland, Oldham invited Baby Dee to support him and Matt Sweeney on their Superwolf tour, and apparently she made enough of an impression that Oldham and Sweeney subsequently signed on to produce and play on her excellent Drag City debut Safe Inside the Day, the album rounded out by vets of Hegarty's band, Chavez, Current 93, and no less than incredible hulk Andrew WK on bass.
Even were the Antony connection not explicit, there's no missing some musical similarities. As with Antony, Baby Dee gets over on her total, naked sincerity, the kind of presence and honesty that pushes right through any preconceived notions. She shares this quality with a host of fellow outsiders and eccentrics, everyone from Tiny Tim through Tom Waits, artists who approached cabaret and vaudeville in a manner that transcended categorization.
Baby Dee's earlier releases were solo affairs, and while she's certainly surrounded by steady hands here, she's hardly leaning on her collaborators for support. If anything, given the explicitly autobiographical bent of Safe Inside the Day, it's overwhelmingly Baby Dee's show, and for better or for worse her outsized personality dominates, even on instrumental tracks like "A Christmas Jig for a Three-Legged Cat" or "Flower on the Tracks". Those instrumentals come late in the album, and since by then you've been well-immersed in her world, lyrics or not those instrumentals continue in the mode established earlier by songs like the title track and "The Only Bones That Show".
It's on cuts like these that Baby Dee brings us back to her Cleveland roots, from whence stem memories dark, wistful, and sometimes even a tad humorous. In the latter category falls "The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities", about a pair of neighborhood characters who take an ax to an upright piano. The rest of the disc is populated with drunks and daddy, damaged goods and dreamers, subjects given arrangements that wouldn't have been out of place on Waits' Rain Dogs but here are offered with a confessional edge.
The twisted piano ditty "Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town)", for example, denotes a litany of abuses levied on an albino victim, with Baby Dee's voice a mix of ironic sun and menacing snarl. In "The Only Bones That Show", it's teeth that link smiles with violence, vulnerability, and viciousness. In "You'll Find Your Footing" Baby Dee makes hope sound like an illusion embraced by the desperate at rock bottom. "You'll find your footing/ In another world/ On another day/ And in another time/ You'll find your footing there."
It probably goes without saying that Baby Dee has had something of a tough life, but what makes Safe Inside the Day so palatable is its tenderness. If Baby Dee's voice is something of an acquired taste, there's no faking the conviction as she exorcises her demons. Besides, rarely has an exorcism come off so resoundingly beautiful. A heart of darkness and a heart of gold need not be mutually exclusive, and in Baby Dee's world, even a sunrise in hell is no less pretty for its surroundings.
