To do right by A Book of Songs for Anne Marie, the intriguing second LP by Baby Dee for Drag City, it'd be best to unload the Cleveland songwriter's significant baggage asap: Baby Dee is the harpist and pianist on Drag City that is not Joanna Newsom, though both sing as if they delight in discovering new corners and nuances of their own voice. Baby Dee is also the transgender singer that is not her longtime collaborator, Antony Hegarty, though both write with a wonderfully transcendental trust in the way love can reshape our world. And, lastly, Baby Dee is not her mentor and collaborator David Tibet, though her contributions to his Current 93 have been profound and, as she puts it, Tibet was the "patient and forgiving surrogate father" to these dozen Songs.
Dee has long been saddled by these and other obvious comparisons-- Andrew W.K., Will Oldham, Marc Almond, the Dresden Dolls. She's made that observation in interviewers, and critics continue to confirm it in new reviews. Above the lovely breeze of her harp and a string arrangement, she finally protests it on "Black But Comely", explaining that she's more than an assemblage of associations. Indeed, Dee's story is one of the most fascinating you'll ever hear in indie rock. Dee's sex change and her instrumental selection aren't the only hooks: She's worked as a tree pruner, a Coney Island sideshow, a church organist, a street performer, a dance club entertainer, and an arranger for the first incarnation of Antony's the Johnsons. She now lives alone in Cleveland in her parents' quaint house, surrounded by a few cats, her harp, and Andrew W.K.'s grand piano. Her personality is warm and frantic, like that of a grandmother who revels in explaining the brightest and darkest corners of existence. How could you not want to hear this person?
Songs arrives more than six years in the making, and it's the sort of record that-- both for its enchanting arrangements and its presiding theme of using love to fend off evil, sadness, or, at the very least, darkness and cold-- should finally help Dee earn notice equal to that of her contemporaries. The title was originally given to a batch of seven quickly recorded tunes released in 2004 on Tibet's Durtro label. All of those numbers survive here, but they're reinvented by a six-member chamber ensemble that includes producer and arranger Maxim Moston. His violin playing-- a perfect mix of frailty and humor-- is a delicate foil for Dee's vocals, while the band's horns and strings web around her harp to form its perfect bed. A French horn, for instance, peeks from behind the harp's bass note on "Endless Night", adding a spotlight to each of Dee's epiphanies. In her hopefulness, broken words find usefulness, and bastard children earn redemption. "Love is stronger than death/ More jealous than the tomb," she vows one track later, sending the words ahead of her stop-and-start harp, a shield taking the lead into the world's battles.
Dee, now 57, has seen that world from perspectives most couldn't imagine. Her voice, a knotty beauty drunk on personality, shows signs of those experiences. Songs highlights its most interesting aspects in turns. On "Lilacs", where Dee sings of "lovers found" to signify the approach of eternal spring, her robust tone moves in tumbles, slipping in front of and behind the meter like a smiling child skipping through a field on a sunny day. During "As Morning Holds a Star", her voice is at first impossibly sad, choking on its own nervous laughter as Dee notices that nature seems out of order. "When robins wake a winter day/ There must be some mistake," she trembles. At the song's other end, though, her voice lifts-- as faint at first as a ray of light passing through a storm cloud, but then grand and resplendent. "No more night skies/ I've got a sunrise," she boasts, repeating that last word four times. Good for her-- after all, it's time this sometimes obtuse, always evocative work finds a wider light.
