German lieder rock with sweet Baby Dee
April 16, 2010|By Jessica Hopper, Special to the Tribune
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2010-04-16/entertainment/ct-ott-0416-baby-dee-20100416_1_songs-lieder-baby-deeFor Baby Dee, there is no shaping influence. "For most artists, you're influenced by whatever was big and meaningful for you when you were teenage," says the singer. "At that age, I was really into Bach. Most other people studying music, that's where they start. I was 17, into Bach, and I just went backwards from there," she says, laughing.
Baby Dee's latest album, "A Book of Songs," her second for local label Drag City, is a true throwback — to the Romantic era. The tradition she is mining is not indie rock — it's German lieder.
"Lieder is an apt comparison, but this is just how my obsessions from my 20s — the composer Palestrina, renaissance music — are coming out in what I wrote much later," she explains. "A Book of Songs" is largely work composed in 2002-03 for a limited release of 150 copies. "I am not into Schubert — my influences are much more arcane."
