Illinois Entertainer March 2014 | Page 22

I t was the best of times, it was the worst of times. This January, Dee Dee Penny -- nee Kristin Welchez, wife of Crocodiles frontman Brandon Welchez – was feeling lava-hot in the dead of winter. Her garage-rock collective Dum Dum Girls was about to release its third long-playing record via Sub Pop, Too True, and she'd booked an appearance with David Letterman to premiere its kickoff single, the funereal march "Lost Boys and Girls Club." But the sizzle soon froze over as she careened headlong into some cold, harsh reality. "It was just a bad-luck sort of week," the singer/guitarist sighs, grimly. "I was on a family vacation the week before the album came out and I was staying with my in-laws. But they both were sick, and I probably doomed myself to it because I kept thinking 'Fuck! I'm gonna get a cold!' I unfortunately have a very weak respiratory system, so I always get bronchitis. So that's what happened – I started getting really sick. We played our show in L.A. and that one was fine." Then she flew back home to New York – where she and her husband moved two years ago – for the Letterman appearance. "And that was a real struggle – despite being back from my bigger trauma, of course I get bronchitis right before "Letterman"!" For Penny, it was merely the arsenic icing on an already poison-laced cake. Life had been difficult for her over the past few years. Three close friends had passed away, as well as her mother, from cancer in 2010, and she spent most of her last two releases – 2011's chiming Only In Dreams album and the 2012 EP End of Daze – processing the tragic losses, assisted by her longtime studio coconspirator, The Raveonettes' Sune Rose Wagner. "I know that experiencing the death of a close family member is not really a huge deal in the big picture," she explains, doing her best to rationalize what she went through. "But 22 illinoisentertainer.com march 2014 it is something that heavily affected me, personally, and it really consumed me and what I was able to write about. It gives you a pretty instant new perspective on things, and I'm at that point in my life where this is just going to happen, more and more. And it's very much a motivating factor to really not hang on to the bullshit." By the end of 2012, Penny thought her skies had cleared. She was wrong. 2013 quickly became her annus horribilus, easily the worst year of her life. Which made that "Letterman" snafu all the more ominous. She knew how to warble. Knew how her entire life. "Having studied with a voice teacher – and having studied music in college, not just from a garage-band, or an I-sing-in-apunk-band way – I always had the structure of a more classically-trained singer," she recalls. "So my voice is something that I've always had – I've always felt like I could count on it without much effort." But her throat had started acting up, her cool-kitten-ish croon cutting out on her in concert after concert. "I had to force myself through a song, and while performing I was starting to become self-conscious," she recollects with a shiver. "And when I started having performance problems, that was really stressful, and they sort of came to head when I started recording this album." She'd tracked all of the instrumental parts. But when it came to step up to the mic, she faltered. "I was just unable to sing – there was no way that I could record an album with the condition that my voice was in." And she'd heard all the modern-day horror stories – talented vocalists like The Vaccines' Justin Young and Pink Martini's China Forbes developing vocal-cord nodes that bled, forming scar tissue that necessitated several serious operations. "So I was trying not to go dark or anything," she chuckles wryly. "But then you think about Julie Andrews, someone who had the voice of an angel and lost it permanently. I couldn't even fathom what that would be like. I mean, you'd better be in a very zenlike relationship with your life to be able to handle something like that." Pause. "Knock on wood." The diagnosis? Yes, Penny had begun to develop those dreaded nodes, often the death knell for professional entertainers. She had been in her old haunt of Los Angeles recording, so she left said sessions in limbo, went back to the Big Apple, took three months off from singing, and started mapping out how to get her brassy voice back. "My vocal nodes were very much at the beginning stages, so it was just an issue of removing the strain, as well as the swelling, because incorrect friction can sort of dissipate on its own," she says with newfound medical authority. She reacquainted herself with a vocal coach, began rehabilitation therapy. "And it was terrifying, because it's everything that has defined me my whole life, singing, and more recently, It's what I do for a living." Essentially, the artist cedes, she had to re-learn her skill all over again. She was told that she'd developed some terrible habits, rocking out with her traditionally all-female Dum Dum Girls, fleshed out onstage by an ever-shifting lineup that's included many women who've struck out on their own, like Frankie Rose and Sisu bandleader Sandra Vu. Instead of using the single muscle that is the vocal cord, she'd been using her neck and her tongue to overcompensate, which made her condition even worse. The toughest part, she says, was suddenly understanding how difficult these habits would be to shake. "They put me through a lot of ridiculous vocal exercises," she