Before Baby Dee began performing with Antony and the Johnsons, Current 93 or Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, she was best known for playing a harp while riding a tricycle through downtown New York in a cat suit. The one-time street artist and Coney Island Sideshow performer may cut an eccentric figure at the harp or piano with her wild mass of curls, but her idiosyncratic, tender and often hilarious songs are in no way part of a novelty act. The transgendered artist creates work that employs humour and absurdity to bear witness to the light and shadow of human experience. EYE WEEKLY spoke to her by email in advance of her show at The Drake on Feb. 6 to perform songs from her new record, Safe Inside the Day.

How did your relationship to performance change when you started recording music?
Those [early] songs were different —?they weren’t for performing. Up until that point in my life, performing meant making people laugh and getting a buck out of them. I learned to perform on the bar at [New York night spot Pyramid Club] with my tits out. The songs I started writing once I finally got started were a different sort of thing. I couldn’t sing them on a bar with my tits out, so I just recorded them.

Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy (a.k.a. Will Oldham) has covered your music and also appears on your new record. Have you collaborated in other ways?
I don’t think anybody realizes how much Will did for this new album. First of all, he talked me into doing it. I wanted to make an album, but I didn’t want to make this album — I wanted to make a nice album. I wanted to sing songs about a world where teeth are not the only bones that show, where nobody is ever fresh out of candles, where possibilities only increase and never diminish and there’s no such thing as an Earlie King [an evil spirit from her song “The Earlie King”]. So don’t blame me. It’s all Will’s fault — him and Matt Sweeney — they’re the ones that did it.

You touch on classic cabaret conventions in songs like “Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town),” which is infectious and wonderfully vulgar. Is that tradition important to you?
Bad taste and stupidity just come naturally to some of us. It’s a constant inner struggle to not become prideful and conceited when you’ve achieved the impossible and written the stupidest and most tasteless song in the world. So I try to remember that I’m just standing on the shoulders of stupid and tasteless giants.

Would you prefer to make an audience laugh or cry?
I like to laugh. But mostly I use the stupid songs to sweep away what’s come before and start over. It’s just a sort of devil’s dance I have to do with myself — an attempt at trying to keep myself honest.

Do glamorous costumes such as the bilateral hermaphrodite (one side male, one side female) help you connect with an audience, or is it a way to protect yourself?
Believe me there was nothing glamorous about the hermaphrodite! That was a very grimy job. The cat was a little bit glamorous though. I loved being a cat. A costume can be kind of a suit of armour. But the cat was different. I loved being a cat. I loved it so much I’ll say it again. I loved being a cat.

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