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BABY DEE, "MADE FOR LOVE" |
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Written by Jonathan Dean
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Sunday, 12 June 2005 |
This three-track CDEP follows closely on the tails of Baby Dee's recent A Book of Songs for Anne-Marie, which was her first full-length since the double-disc masterpiece Love's Small Song.
Durtro Jnana
Very little has changed about Baby Dee's sound since her earliest
demos, still the same hauntingly affected voice singing fragile songs
about love, loss, gender, identity, mothers and fathers, and the tiny,
seemingly insignificant memories that collect over time to comprise our
emotional lives. On all three of these tracks, Baby Dee accompanies
herself on piano (no harp this time), with bright, sad minor-key
melodies that set her songs aloft. There is still something
unmistakably, gnawingly creepy about the pain and sadness that seems an
inseparable part of Baby Dee's transgender vocals, even when she sings
relatively joyful songs like "Morning Fire," a simple and sweet
declaration of love. On "Three Women," Dee sings a mournful song which
seems to be about her desire for motherhood: "I'm making a cradle/Out
of broken arms/Out of arms that sing." On the song's masculine
counterpart "Three Men," Dee sings lyrics so achingly simple they could
be straight out of a book of nursery rhymes, but they are nonetheless
sad and evocative: "I went to see my mother/And I got lost/Now it's so
hard to get home...I heard your children singing/In a western sky/Let
them call that sky their own." There are many who will doubtless
continue to regard Baby Dee as a novelty freak show (as a youth, she
worked in a Coney Island circus sideshow as a bilateral hermaphrodite),
something along the lines of a transsexual Tiny Tim. However, there are
a precious few enthusiasts, who like me, never regarded Tiny Tim as a
novelty act, and don't think of Baby Dee that way either. Baby Dee is
an utterly unique voice in contemporary music, one that once you have
let it into your heart, can scarcely be forgot. - Jonathan Dean
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