Baby Dee

Eccentric among eccentrics, Baby Dee has somehow combined every possible western musical tangent, no matter how fleeting. Dee’s songwriting simultaneously illustrates profound revelation while inciting laughter. With timeless song craft, Baby Dee explores the tragic comedy of the human spirit. In short, salvation, love hating love, perseverance and perversity sit down at the same table.

A renaissance spirit, Baby Dee has been a music director for a catholic church, a classically trained multi instrumentalist, a street performer, a circus performer and even ran a tree removal service. Moving back to Cleveland in 2002, she began songwriting, which reveals this renaissance spirit. She is able to write venomous, obscene songs about albino dwarfs and empathy fueled mysticism, such as the closer “You’ll Find Your Footing.”

Warmly produced by Bonnie Prince Billy and Matt Sweeney, Safe Inside The Day (her fourth album) follows an autobiographical non-linear song cycle about the street she grew up on in Cleveland, Ohio. Though piano functions as song foundation, instrumentation such as harp, crazy percussion, violin, cello, blasting horns and snaking guitar create the emotional sonic textures.

The soothing title song bears similarities to a simple hymn. Hopeful lyrics like “with laughing babe and smiling bride/ on gentle horses/ safe inside the day” suggest the sacred, intense poetical sensibility and the secular. Musically, the piano progression comes across thoughtful and in the major mostly while vocals are lifting similar to a church hymn.

Such optimism careens suddenly into the malicious, drunken dark spirit of the “The Earlie King,” the first of many haunting character sketches that stealthily and obscenely glide through Dee’s vivid world. Curiously poetic, the chorus taunts, “spill the milk/ steal the meat/ Life is bitter/ and Death is sweet.” The lines sound like a weird, woefully driven superstitious chant to ward off evil or possibly a secret society’s motto for life.

Full of pathos and compassion if it had a sound, the instrumental “Flowers on the Track” suggest baroque styling with plucked violin, melancholy swathing cellos and a piano progression that can make any hardened fool cry in a defined societal era of post emotions. Metaphoric and hyperbolic language can often fail flatly when describing music as this can fling the gates of hermeticism open. Bluntly, the song has the emotional nuances of a black bird flying slowly out of sight in a deep southern sky wild with snowfall.

Suggesting Lewis Carroll’s darker imaginative manias, “The Only Bones That Show” explores a bizarre childhood experience. Like a circus or a post modern medicine show, the song dances and swerves with soaring horns, muscular bass flexing, and chorus backup singers with intensive mania. marching with whimsical, bluesy piano. The song also has some slicing manic violin. Lyrics tell the tale of a strange child or a child experiencing the mysterious verging on supernatural hallucinations, maybe both. Why is the protagonist up in the trees in winter time with the haunting mantra of “teeth are the only bones that show?”

Tango haunted, “Bad Kidneys” sears with hypnotized accordion mingling with jazzy electric piano creating mood similar to walking down a gritty, rain slick, night swallowed street. The song crescendos with a swelling demented meowing choir fragmenting into what sounds like chirping birds which would arch a smile on Walt Disney’s ghost.

The most intense collision of sacred and secular, “Fresh Out Of Candles” explores religion’s ill whacking, obtuse cons with family disillusionment embraced within a glam cabaret musical setting. Dee sings hauntingly authoritative, “Father Son and Holy Ghost/ Stole the bacon and burnt the toast/ Poor Saint Blaise/ Went chokin’ on steak and eggs.” While such lines may not make linear sense, such unholy word alliances tend to linger and emotionally provoke. She hits the song’s (and even the album’s) epiphany on the next lyrical stanza. With blunt pizzazz and punctuated conviction she reveals, “Now God wasn’t kiddin’/ and neither was Abraham/ And your Mamma can’t save you/ And your daddy don’t give a damn.”

Rock and roll has not been this cruelly fun, theatrical and transcendent in years! What strikes one the most about Baby Dee is an eccentric compassion as well as passion illuminated from a song craft that perilously pulls from living life’s shoddy, horrific open ended comedy as tragedy.

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