Whatever happened to Baby Dee?

Baby Dee is steadfast in her desire to avoid an interview focusing on her life history. "Who cares? What a bore!" cackles the singer-songwriter-pianist-harpist.

Bowing to her request, the conversation steers clear of such potentially boring topics as her days as a harp-playing bear in Central Park and Paris; a tricycle-riding accordion-playing cat; a Catholic Church organist; a "bilateral hermaphrodite" at a Coney Island sideshow; and a Kamikaze Freakshow performer who lay on broken glass while concrete slabs were broken over her head with a sledgehammer.

Her transgendered status is another nonstarter during this phone chat from Hastings, about two hours south of London, where Dee is visiting friend and musical collaborator David Tibet.

Instead, the 50-something performer — "I never reveal my birth name! ... Wikipedia can go to hell!" — chooses to discuss the last eight years of her life, when she became a recording artist.

"I always wanted to write music, but I was always too tied up in knots," says Dee, who was raised, along with a brother and sister, in an Irish household in a blue-collar neighborhood by the railroad tracks on "the steel side" of Cleveland. "It wasn't until I was in my 40s that I found I could write songs. I always thought to write music, you had to be a composer."

After living in New York for 30 years, Dee moved back to Cleveland, caring for her mother after the father died.

"Here I was in my 40s and living with my mother," she says. "It felt awful."

By tapping into those feelings, she came up with the songs on her first two (and now out-of-print) discs for Tibet's Durtro label — 2000s "The Little Window" and 2001's "Love's Small Song," respectively. Last year, they were repackaged as "The Robin's Tiny Throat."

That set the stage for her new "Safe Inside The Day" CD, which she and her four-piece band are showcasing on the tour that comes to the Triple Door Monday. A love-it-or-hate-it kind of record, "Safe Inside The Day" generated a buzz months before it was released last month. Musically it suggests a wide range of offbeat artists — Rufus Wainwright, Randy Newman, Kurt Weill, Pere Ubu's David Thomas and (gulp!) Tiny Tim. And more often than not, Dee's torchy, one-of-a-kind vocalizing and poetic songwriting convey rubbed-raw emotion, sublime feelings of transcendence and even creepy fun.

Dee says "Safe Inside The Day" was not the album she intended to make. Originally she wanted to rerecord the nine or 10 songs she did for an EP that was part of a 2004 package called "A Book of Songs for Anne Marie." "Only 150 copies of that book were made," says Dee. "The lyrics [to the songs] were typed to look like poetry. The [EP] was almost like a field recording. I went into the studio, sang through the song in one take and sent it to David [Tibet]."

But Dee's "Safe Inside The Day" co-producer, indie-rocker Will Oldham, aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy, urged her to record new material, a suggestion she initially resisted.

"Those songs are from a very dark place," explains Dee. "Putting lyrics like that out in the world is like dropping a tree on someone's house."

Dee's resistance to recording the songs that became "Safe Inside The Day" melted after hearing "Fresh Out of Candles," a tale of icons brought low, augmented by musicians Oldham, Matt Sweeney, Andrew WK, Robbie Lee, Max Moston (Antony and the Johnsons), Bill Breeze (Psychic TV), John Contreras (Current 93) and James Lo (Chavez).

"They created this whole beautiful thing out of this hideous, horrible, hateful song," says Dee. "They did the same with these other songs. All of sudden, I thought that dark place might not turn out to be so dark and ugly if I'm not doing it alone."