The multi-talented Lea DeLaria first made her mark as one of the few openly gay comics to hit the comedy circuit more than a decade ago. After covering an amazing stretch of artistic ground—from stand-up comedy to sold-out one-woman shows to critically acclaimed roles in such smash Broadway productions as On the Town and The Rocky Horror Show, plus the off-Broadway Most Fabulous Story Ever Told—DeLaria is back in the spotlight as a singer with her Telarc debut Double Standards.

Her early independent albums, Bulldyke In A China Shop and Box Lunch, are still cult favorites, but these days you can chalk up DeLaria's massive appeal to her astounding vocal prowess, not just to cultural trailblazing or impeccable comic timing.

On DeLaria's 2001 album Play It Cool (Warner Brothers), she performed a collection of Broadway show tunes, drawing on the music of Leonard Bernstein, Randy Newman, Tom Waits and Stephen Sondheim, among others. She is back in March with her Telarc debut, Double Standards, a brilliant selection of rock classics given the jazz treatment. Backed by a stellar cast including the legendary pianist Gil Goldstein, bassist Christian McBride and drummer Bill Stewart, Lea DeLaria delivers surprise after surprise on Double Standards, covering the likes of Blondie's "Call Me," Patti Smith's "Dancing Barefoot," Jane's Addiction "Been Caught Stealing," and The Doors' "People Are Strange."

The roots of DeLaria's love of music go back to her childhood, growing up in St. Louis. "My father made his living as a jazz pianist, so jazz was always playing in our house," she relates." He got early on that I was a ham, so he encouraged me to sing. As a teenager, I sang with him in the clubs in East St. Louis. My dad taught me that, if I was going to be a vocalist, I had to not just listen to other singers and the words to the songs, but to the language of music. He made me listen to Coltrane, Bird and Miles Davis, and he always said, "be a musician" never be a chick singer." It goes back to the old joke: "How do you know when a jazz chick singer's knocking at your door? She doesn't know when to come in and she doesn't have her key."

For DeLaria, who counts among her musical heroes Chet Baker, Ella Fitzgerald and Anita O'Day, it was only after she started punctuating her stand-up routines with musical interludes that her career as a vocalist really began to bloom. "My act was kind of crazy and loud, so what I would do is to give people a break by singing a jazz tune," she recalls. "What eventually ended up happening was that my shows, which I would write, not only reflected whatever was going on in the world at the time, but whatever song I was trying to learn." By 1997, the year DeLaria made her Broadway debut, "people really wanted to hear me sing more than talk," she says.