Baby love

DEE LIGHTFUL It’s a safe bet that Baby Dee can play the harp on a tricycle better than you can.

There’s a YouTube video of Baby Dee wearing a bee costume and riding a giant tricycle in a circle on a Providence sidewalk while dramatically recounting a scatological prank involving a 300-pound midget, a baby Jesus costume and an Entenmann’s chocolate cake. Despite this empirical evidence, the Cleveland-born vocalist, pianist, harpist, accordionist and composer argues—with sincerity—that “I’m not a theatrical kind of person.”

“No,” she adds, with a stage laugh that falls somewhere between vintage Bette Davis and classic Phyllis Diller, “I’m just a regular old hermaphrodite.”

Her claims of nontheatricality are seemingly betrayed by a 30-year career of performing in circus sideshows, dingy bars, art spaces and New York streets, where she busked atop a customized (obviously) harp-bearing tricycle. The context of her antitheatricality claims are explanations of how her spectacular new album Safe Inside the Day (Drag City) differs from her previous work.

“Everything else I’ve done was just little me, doing whatever I felt like, never working with a set list,” she explains. “I’m not a production kind of person who knows what will happen next. But you can’t work like that when you bring friends along for the ride. You really have to plan things out.”

Those friends, including Will Oldham (in Bonnie “Prince” Billy mode) and Matt Sweeney, who serve as band members and producers on the album, have helped capture a unique talent in a manner that feels simultaneously raw and luxurious. Baby Dee’s certainly not an outsider artist (what could be more art school–aware than a fecal baby Jesus performance-art installation?), but her eccentricities, combined with years of toil in unjust obscurity, certainly lend her a patina of authenticity that her collaborators are determined to let shine through. While their contributions make Safe Inside the Day a more varied and richly layered collection than her previous albums (obscure, but collected on last year’s double disc The Robin’s Tiny Throat, on Durtro), they ultimately capture the stripped-down vibe of her live performances better than a solo work could.

Baby Dee has a husky, expressive voice, not androgynous in any traditional sense, but certainly lent to phrasing and dynamics more associated with female singers, particularly those of the 78-rpm record era. That said, there is a contemporary vibe to this recording; despite her smorgasbord of cabaret, piano-bar and juke-joint musical references, if Baby Dee can be compared to anyone it’s to revivalists of the last 40 years rather than to old-time artists. Her craftsmanship creates a rich aura that falls somewhere between Tom Waits’s early barfly character and his later metal-clanging experiments.

Baby Dee’s embrace of the past references both Ian Whitcomb’s elegance and Tiny Tim’s absurdity. And her joyfully bawdy rent-party masterpiece, “Big Titty Bee Girl,” recalls the Blue Thumb albums of ’70s transvestite icon Sylvester more than any actual 1930s diva.But the heart of the album is not nostalgia or absurdity. It brims with lyrics about bacon, cans of nails and albino lynching, though any wackiness generally serves to frame honest, autobiographical passages, seemingly inspired by a return home to Cleveland necessitated by a family crisis and by the rising costs of New York living in the post-Giuliani real-estate era. A return to her beloved Gotham is likely not in the cards (“…unless I sell millions of copies of the new record”), but Baby Dee is not one to romanticize her rust-belt roots. “The Midwest to me was a place to leave. I just wanted out. Midwesterners make great New Yorkers because they really appreciate the place.”

But a conversation with Baby Dee betrays her heartland values and reveals a sweetness at odds with the diva attitudes and artistic-genius arrogance so prevalent in the drag-queen and performance-art circles she has negotiated for the last three decades. “When I did my silly act on that tricycle,” the performer recalls, “I had some of my finest moments…if I saw a couple that was in love, I had the ability to swoop down on them and play a love song on a harp. I figured the universe owes them at least that much….”

And what does the universe owe Baby Dee?

“A life of luxury,” she says with a cackle, effortlessly shifting back into full-on Phyllis Diller mode, “and an indoor swimming pool!”

Baby Dee plays Empty Bottle February 7.