If I hear the phrase “I contain multitudes” smugly delivered by an Instagram-addicted arts professional one more time, then I’m gonna sing my own body electric with a cold bath and a plug-in heater. However, Baby Dee is the one person that I have met on Earth who does contain multitudes. Baby Dee has had more lives than the Dalai Lama. She was a tree surgeon, a freak show performer, a bumble bee-themed street musician and a church organist who believed she was possessed by the ghost of Palestrina. She’s also the composer of some of the greatest songs I’ve ever heard and can count artists as storied as Marc Almond, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, David Tibet and Michael Gira amongst her most voluble champions.
She now lives in rural Holland where she is larping as a respectable citizen who’s retired from the business of show. But you just can’t keep a reclusive genius down. Child of Joy is her first album in 11 years and is released by long-term collaborators Tin Angel Records. Although the 12 songs here are essentially reworkings of old material (stretching between her 2001 debut, Tiny Windows, and 2015’s I Am a Stick), it’s a testament to the strength of the originals that they are so luminous in their reincarnated state. Where they were previously recorded on billowing piano and stately harp, here Dee has transposed them to accordion, and it gives the impression of the songs being both preciously intimate and impossibly vast. It brings to mind a quote from her 2008 song ‘Safe Inside the Day ’: “a gift that’s bigger than the box it came in”. Her accordion sounds like a consort of viols in Renaissance polyphony in its droning, contrapuntal, harmonically rich, deeply romantic complexity.
This is evident from the opening bars of the first song, My Heart’s Come Home to Me. A cyclical, wheezing motif grows from a 3-note refrain into an elaborate ode to yearning with the kind of symphonic grandeur you’d associate with Gustav Mahler. And the lyrics are equally as profound: “To make men seem as good as gods/ that God himself look down and say ‘My heart’s come home to me’” sends centipedes of pleasure shivering down my spine. Dee’s lyrics have an ancient, Homeric quality that feels like they’ve been ventriloquised through many generations of mouths into hers. They vibrate with a poetic virility that transcends time and environment and echoes through your body.
None more so than on the aching Half A Chance with Dee intoning “How many treetops in the wind/ would rustle every leaf with hope/ if I could hear you laughing there?” over rapidly arpeggiated accordion and lusty backing vocals like the barbershop quartet of my heart.
This is music to fall in love to. It speaks of our private joys and most profound anxieties. Songs such as Lilacs and A Compass of the Light identify our deepest instincts towards human connection. Alternatively, So Bad and When I Get Home telescope us to traumatic childhood memories of Dee imagining her mother being beaten up by Jesus in a confessional box and conflicted reminiscences of paternal rage.
Props to the band – these aren’t easy songs to accompany. Dee’s sense of rhythm is highly emotive and seems to correspond to an internal metronome which is synchronous to her galloping heart. But that is precisely what elevates Child of Joy from being likeable to loveable.
Special mention must also go to Peter Slager. Not only did he play multiple instruments on Child of Joy, but he also recorded, mixed and produced it in his home studio. In Dee’s own words:
“We recorded in a farmhouse in Westkappel. It was a farm for horses. I could look up from my accordion and right out the window were these beautiful beasts. It was Peter’s own place and we had all the time in the world. How I loved that. Peter supplied the inclination to do it and also the wonderful location. It was like a family affair with Tonnie and Tamara and Ida and Fay and all the wonderful players that Peter brought in.”
Dee is the great chronicler of everyday miracles, written in alphabets of light. She has the eye of a poet and the hands of a carpenter. This is the perfect antidote to the modern world. Her gift to us is the permission to experience the world in the way that she does – populated by capricious gods, embittered kings, cruel fathers, spiritual robins, eternal lovers. It is a gift bigger than the box it comes in. You could say that Baby Dee contains multitudes, but you didn’t hear that from me. Alright?
Child of Joy (September 25th, 2026) Tin Angel Records