Story — D. Fountain
There is a version of this story that would be easy to tell — and completely wrong.
Introduction
DeeDee Fountain has been writing and performing music for close to two decades, though not always under this name, and not always as the person she is today. What’s changed isn’t the ambition. It’s the clarity.
Can't Wait Until Dark, released 2010 under The Davis Fountain
The First Chapter
In 2010, performing as The Davis Fountain, she released Can’t Wait Until Dark — a record built on mood, texture, and a fairly stubborn refusal to sit inside one genre. It found an audience, though not a large one, and it arrived at a moment when the conversations now common around identity, genre-blurring, and artistic reinvention were still mostly happening at the margins.
Looking back, DeeDee sees the record as work that came together before the language surrounding her identity and creative instincts had fully entered the mainstream. That’s her read on it, offered with some distance and, honestly, a little humor about how these things go. She’s not interested in claiming the album was ahead of anything — only in acknowledging that it existed in a different climate than the one she’s making music in now.
Berlin
Berlin
Not long after, she moved to Berlin, where she stayed for nearly eight years. It wasn’t a pilgrimage and it wasn’t a reinvention plot — it was a place to live, and she lived there, the way people live somewhere for the better part of a decade: unevenly, and without a script.
The years abroad broadened her creative vocabulary, sharpened her independence, and gave her a clearer sense of herself, at some remove from whatever expectations had followed her out of the first chapter. She doesn’t describe it as a transformation story, and she’s wary of anyone who would. It was simply where a large stretch of her adult life happened, and it left a mark on how she hears music and how she thinks about making it.
Alignment
For close to twenty years, DeeDee lived outside conventional binary gender expectations. Five years ago, at 39, she transitioned. She’s precise about what that does and doesn’t mean: it wasn’t the start of her identity, and it isn’t the reason for her return to music. It brought parts of her life that had existed for a long time into clearer focus.
She doesn’t treat it as the climax of the story or the explanation for everything that came before or after. It sits alongside the record and the years in Berlin as one part of a longer account — not the whole of it, and not the most important part by default just because it’s the most recent.
DeeDee Fountain — present day
The New Chapter
DeeDee is returning to entertainment as DeeDee Fountain, with more experience than she had the first time and considerably less interest in performing a certainty she doesn’t feel. The “dark goddess” image shows up in some of her visual and creative choices — it’s a useful shorthand for a particular kind of confidence, not a costume she plans to wear indefinitely or a mythology she’s trying to build around herself.
What she’s making now draws on all of it: the record made under another name, years spent somewhere else entirely, and a clearer read on who she is. She isn’t trying to erase the first chapter or replace it with something more palatable. She’s writing the next one, and she’s aware — with some wry distance — that the next one doesn’t have to explain the last one to be worth hearing.
The full account of how these chapters connect is still being written, including by her. What’s certain is that this isn’t a comeback built on nostalgia, and it isn’t a rebrand. It’s an artist continuing a body of work that never actually stopped, even during the years it was quiet.