Baby Dee: A Book of Songs
Dan Cairns
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/cd_reviews/article7056714.eceFirst released in 2004 as a limited-edition book with accompanying CD (a mere 150 copies were issued), this beautiful album, reupholstered here by Maxim Moston, of Antony and the Johnsons, serves as a sort of prequel to the former Ohio church organist and transsexual harpist/performance artist's acclaimed Safe Inside the Day (2008). Crudely, you could describe Baby Dee's sound as midway between Joanna Newsom and Antony Hegarty — a harp is plucked, sonorous piano and keening violin gild the arrangements, her vocals tremble with histrionic vibrato. But she brings other gifts to the table: narrative and musical structures that evoke madrigal and lieder, the shadows and menace of Britten's songs and the soliloquising of Sondheim, and, advantageously, give no quarter whatsoever to the idea that an album by a singer-songwriter need adhere to the limitations of pop convention.
