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
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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