Laying down the lyrical law

Years of performing with other bands have prepared Joan as Police Woman for the solo career she has forged in the past few years. After three albums of solo material, has she adjusted to her role in the limelight?

EXCUSE ME, but a policewoman is talking to me on the phone. And not just any female member of the law; no, the long arm of Joan Wasser reaches out across the years and touches on performing with cult bands, studying classical violin at Boston University, engaging in romantic affairs with Jeff Buckley, performing with Antony and the Johnsons and other such legal activities.

Wasser has been around for some time, then. She is now in her early 40s, and has for the past six years delicately but determinedly forged a solo career of often-sparkling proportions under the name Joan as Police Woman. Three albums of original material (2006's Real Life, 2008's To Surviveand the just released The Deep Field) have showcased her talents to the point where one wonders if she really needs to do anything else to prove to people how good she is.

“I’m not good at singing like Aretha Franklin yet, but I’m working on it,” says Wasser in the kind of half-crackle, half-brittle voice that instantly places her as a long-time resident of New York. Her singing voice is the epitome of smooth, almost sky-scraping ease, however, which makes her point about Franklin’s vocals all the more curious.

“I have a certain quest for finding new musical ideas, as I’m constantly working on music that’s really fun for me to do. I don’t think I’m particularly obsessive, either. I work on music when it feels good, and when I don’t feel like doing it I go outside and ride my bike. It feels good to have the inspiration come along and to take advantage of it, but if it’s not there I do something else until it shows up.

“It doesn’t really work for me any other way. I don’t know that it works for anyone any other way, so I can only speak for myself. I sort of let the inspiration show up. Some days are better than others. You have to hang out and wait for it. And waiting is fine.”

Wasser should know; she has paid her dues over and over again since her early 20s, when she put time and effort into bands that very few of us have heard of (The Dambuilders, Black Beetle, Those Bastard Sons). Through the 1990s she gravitated from one cult act to the next, hitting it off with Jeff Buckley and touring first with Antony and the Johnsons and then with Rufus Wainwright.

Yet it is her very own creativity and talent that have brought her, somewhat reluctantly it seems, into the shimmering limelight. To some she is an unknown quantity, to others she is one of the best female vocalists around. Would she regard herself as being, commercially speaking, an under-the-radar act?

“It’s hard for me to know what’s happening to myself, commercially. I make the music that feels right for me, and then if other people like it I’m really happy. I know I haven’t had hugely successful hit singles, so, yes, quite a few people haven’t heard of me – they haven’t a clue who I am, in fact. But you know, it depends on what type of radar screen you’re looking at, doesn’t it?”

Not that playing to huge crowds or gaining a huge audience is a priority. Aside from an urge to perform on stage with Prince – “He’s such a mysterious creature and a musical genius,” she gushes – she seems to have a tight rein on her sense of ambition, as if pushing her luck and hope too far might not be the wisest thing to do.

“I started playing in bands in college, and then it all rolled out from there,” she says. “I’d never imagined writing my own songs, I’d never imagined singing them – they were not what I aimed at or strived for. But things happen in your life.”

She started out studying violin, she recalls, while also taking in slightly rowdier music from the likes of Sonic Youth, Black Flag and Bad Brains. “I loved playing violin, and I can’t say that back then I actually knew what I wanted to do with it. So I figured I’d learn, at least, how to play the instrument, and then see what happened as I went along.

“What I did find is I was someone that played really for the love of music and for the love of playing. I never really practised for hours and hours a day; I got by through doing a certain amount of work. Yet most of the other people there had been playing since the age of three.

“That was not my reality. I played the instrument, and it wasn’t looked upon as being a very serious thing to do. But when I got to college it was very shocking to me that people spent so long at it. I did that, too, just to see what would happen, and, of course, I learned that practising makes you better. Putting in the discipline and getting results: that was possibly the greatest lesson I learned at college.”

Those college days are long gone, replaced by a grounding in life and all that it can throw at you. Between Buckley’s death and the more recent passing of her mother, Wasser appears to have had her share of misery.

“These days I’m having a good time writing songs about joy,” she says, her broad laughter to the fore. “But we all know that despair and joy go hand in hand, right?”

You tend not to appreciate joy if you don’t experience periods of despair is what Wasser is saying. She remembers that her previous album of original material, To Survive, was about the sombre reality of mourning.

“I was living through a difficult period in a number of ways, the most significant being my mother’s passing. I was determined to pass through that time myself, experiencing the feelings that go along with such an event, so that I could come out the other side clean, if you know what I mean. So I tried to fit into those feelings that are scary most of the time – even if they were uncomfortable.”

Wasser came through that, as most people do, and started feeling better, freer, even. Her new album is, she says, about having a bit more fun, becoming slightly more renewed. “More, if I can use the word in its correct sense, alive. Forget the wallowing, you know? Start living.”

The Deep Fieldis released this weekend. Joan as Police Woman performs at the Button Factory, Dublin, on Thursday, February 10th