Joan as Policewoman

Paris Pompor
September 22, 2006

Jeff Buckley's ex channels '70s sex bomb Angie Dickinson.

New Yorker Joan Wasser seemingly sprang from nowhere this year with her impressive debut pop album Real Life.The truth is Wasser has played with everyone from Rufus Wainwright and Nick Cave to Antony and the Johnsons. Some credit her with single-handedly making violin in rock cool again.She was Jeff Buckley's girlfriend at the time of his tragic drowning in 1997. Yet the question most people want Wasser to answer is: what's with the "Joan As Police Woman" alias? "It's in reference to a '70s cop show called Police Woman," Wasser says. "I used to bleach my hair blonde [in my teens]. I was wearing some sort of hideous polyester light-blue pantsuit or something, and my friend said, 'Joan, you are channelling Angie Dickinson from Police Woman!' The other [show I loved] was Charlie's Angels. But that was always bikinis and fluffy hair curling. Angie was a different vibe."Dickinson's cool, tough-talking sex bomb, Sergeant Suzanne "Pepper" Anderson, struck a chord with Wasser.Growing up, Wasser flaunted a platinum mohawk and juggled classical music with a desire to "play loud".Playing in rocking bands such as the Dambuilders, Wasser pushed the limits of her glitter-covered violin by feeding it through amps and effects units. After Buckley's death, she formed a band briefly with his former band members, but in 1999 came another turning point.Wasser joined the Johnsons, a relatively unknown group led by cherub-like singer Antony. She toured with Antony and played on his breakthrough album, I Am A Bird Now. She remembers her five years under his wings as "sensitive and nurturing".

"Meeting Antony really impacted on my life in many ways," Wasser says. "He's one of the most beautiful people I know."I'd been playing really loud music for a long time and I came into this situation where it was all about being quiet. It was great. I needed a place that felt safe ... and [Antony's] music is very healing."Antony encouraged her to step out solo and sing."I hadn't sung and didn't particularly like the way my voice sounded," Wasser says. "It was all very new and quite terrifying."Thankfully, she persevered. The result is the haunting Real Life. It was recorded around piano, bass, drums and guitar, Wasser's coolly emotive delivery and personal lyrics winning you over. She was apprehensive about putting aside the violin to play solo shows accompanied only by her piano and guitar playing. She describes the transition as like "getting naked in front of everyone".

"I'm a person who likes to put myself in uncomfortable positions, if I think I'm going to learn from them. Now I'm more comfortable feeling vulnerable. Before, I was so obsessed with being tough. I was bulletproof, which, if you ever act like that, you know it's the absolute opposite of how you feel.".

Out of the shadows

Michael Dwyer September 29,2006

THERE are reformed Jeff Buckley stalkers in Melbourne who recall Joan Wasser with lingering awe. She was the late rock god's formidable consort, spotted exploring St Kilda with him on his last Australian tour of '95.If looks could kill, her long dreadlocks, chiselled profile and head-to-boots black attire could have wasted a giggly autograph hunter at 50 paces.

It was all front, as it turns out. Wasser was a classically trained violinist who had been similarly awestruck by tough-as-nails punk rock goddesses such as Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon and Brix Smith of the Fall. She channelled all those influences into the fiery attack of her band of the time, the Dambuilders, and several others.

But she's since cropped up in increasingly elegant surrounds: playing strings on albums by Nick Cave, Lou Reed and Antony and the Johnsons; co-directing Hal Wilner's all-star sea shanties project Rogue's Gallery; and singing Hallelujah with Rufus Wainwright at last year's Leonard Cohen celebration at the Sydney Opera House.

Ironic name badge and all, Joan As Police Woman finds the multi-talented New Yorker up front at last, in more ways than one. Her new album Real Life is a work of neo-classical sophistication and tender emotions that aptly reflects the motto on her MySpace page, "Beauty is the new punk rock".

"You can only last so long being bulletproof," she explains of her musical transformation of the past decade. "I always said I had a tough-guy problem. I had to be stronger than all the boys. I had to be able to compete in their world. I had to be indestructible.

"But what is that about?" she asks herself. "That's about much deeper issues that at some point, hopefully, you deal with. At a certain point in my life I had a number of events happen that just broke me, and I'm thankful for it because it forced me to learn who I was and face the fears that were always there.

"Previously I felt that showing weakness was the most horrifying thing. Now I know it's the strongest thing you can do."

There can be little doubt that Buckley's tragic death in 1997 contributed significantly to Wasser's watershed. She played at his funeral with members of his band, and they continued for a couple of years as Black Beetle. But meanwhile she had begun to engage with music in a way she never had, as a singer and songwriter.

"I didn't care at all about writing songs," she says. "I just wanted to play the violin and to expand that palette for myself, which I did really happily for a long time. It was maybe '98 that I picked up the guitar."

The switch from a single-note, lead instrument to a chordal, accompanying instrument had an unexpected side effect: Wasser started singing the melodies her violin and viola might have previously taken care of. What came out both surprised and unsettled her.

"I was horrified by the sound of my voice," she says somewhat incredibly, given its subsequent comparisons to Chrissie Hynde and Dusty Springfield. "Horrified! Oh God! You have to understand, when you start singing and you're not used to it and you're totally afraid of it, it sounds terrible. I've done a lot of work to become relaxed, to become comfortable in a potentially stressful situation, which is all about being revealed and vulnerable. I feel now really comfortable revealing myself, but it took a long time. Because what is there to be afraid of really? Well, you find that out."

In Real Life, Wasser's voice is the polar opposite of terrible. But her fears of revelation were well founded. Literal details may be rendered opaque by her poetry but it's impossible not to hear vivid threads of the journey that has brought her this far. The final track, We Don't Own It, is dedicated to Elliot Smith, but its gracious surrender to the mystery of life and death could apply to any loved one lost to the cruel currents of fate. Several other tracks similarly ache with an understanding of life and transience that's rare on any artist's debut album.

"I feel really lucky that I am starting this at this age (36) and the place in my life that I am," she says. "It's only now that I really feel ready for almost anything that happens. Now I just feel a lot healthier and a lot more able. I have seen a lot of what happens, good and bad, and I do have a certain amount of wisdom about it. And I certainly call upon that wisdom."

Perhaps accordingly, the inevitable question about Buckley's impact on her work is greeted with careful consideration and generosity of spirit. "Jeff, when he performed, was always in the moment of the music and that's something I can never forget," she says at last.

"That's the way he was in life too, and that's something I remember not only when I'm performing onstage but in my everyday life. He loved life more than anyone maybe I've ever known. Following it where it took him. That's a good template for life in general."

Sex and Violins

September 17, 2006

Rock's coolest violinist began performing her own songs after the death of boyfriend Jeff Buckley. She talks to Guy Blackman.

'For a long time, I was really content with playing violin," muses Joan Wasser, who, over the past 15 years, has played with everyone from Sheryl Crow to Lou Reed to Elton John and the Scissor Sisters. "I loved it - loved it, loved it, loved it - and then all of a sudden it wasn't enough."

The larger-than-life, charismatic Wasser first came to notice as violinist for Boston indie-rock outfit the Dambuilders, who made some commercial inroads in the mid-'90s with albums such as Ruby Red. Aside from anything she was doing musically, Wasser always stood out visually from the rest of the group, with her statuesque frame, bright costumes and dyed, often dreadlocked hair.

She is a born head-turner, one of two adopted children raised by loving parents in Connecticut. "I've always been very extroverted and very comfortable with it," Wasser says. "Costumes were kind of massive for me when I was growing up. And when you are in a situation where you're not blood-related to your family, it does become extremely obvious that you're born with your personality."

Up until 1997, though, Wasser had never touched a guitar, and had only ever sung publicly under duress. The violinist whose mohawk caused a scandal in her high-school orchestra was more than happy to remain an accompanist. "It was really fun and really creative, expanding the landscape of the violin for myself," she says. "And then it just naturally happened that I needed more."

The trigger for this change is something Wasser usually tries to avoid discussing. She met singer Jeff Buckley in 1994 and was in a relationship with him up until May 1997, when he drowned accidentally in a Mississippi tributary, while taking a break from recording the follow-up to his hugely successful Grace. Of course, Buckley's death was devastating for Wasser, but ultimately its impact was transformative.

"It seems like that was another life," Wasser said to The Boston Globe last year, "and when that ended, I started a new life. It was like I was birthed, thrown into the freezing water. I felt that I had to start from an infant, really unprotected. And I had an adolescence in there that I'm out of now. And now I feel like I'm actually coming into my own. In the last year, I've matured into my new life."

At first, she was overwhelmed with emotions that she didn't know how to deal with, and her usual creative outlet, playing the violin, wasn't giving her the same release. "I needed to express myself in another way, because I had so much pain," she admits haltingly. "It was like the next step in my musical development. I had all this in me that I didn't know how to express, that I didn't know how to get out."

The Dambuilders also broke up in October that year and, at a loss, Wasser picked up the guitar and began to sing. She then formed the band Black Beetle with members of Buckley's band and, for the first time, began to perform her own songs in front of people. "It was terrifying," she recalls. "And that was really weird because I had felt very comfortable on stage up until then, very comfortable expressing myself to anyone who wanted to hear - or even didn't want to hear. Then, all of a sudden, I'm terrified of opening my mouth on the stage."

Through this process of learning to sing - and working out what she wanted to sing about - Wasser came to believe that she had been lying to herself for years. "I was totally not in contact with myself," she says. "I was a lot more shut down, I was angry, I was jealous. Nothing I'm not now, but I definitely deal with it in a different way. I thought I was being honest to other people and myself, but I realised when I started singing and tried to figure out what I really thought, that I had no idea what it was to be honest, what it was to be truthful, what it was to even really interpret your feelings."

Black Beetle didn't last long, but Wasser had acquired a taste for self-exploratory songwriting. She began augmenting her violin stints in Rufus Wainwright's band and Antony & the Johnsons with shows under the name Joan as Policewoman. The reference comes from the '70s TV series starring Wasser lookalike Angie Dickinson. "She was an undercover cop posing as a drug-dealer's girlfriend and so on, so of course she would be in amazingly revealing outfits," the singer recalls. "Charlie's Angels was really fluffy and always running around in bikinis, but it wasn't so much like that with her, it was more gritty."

Wasser's debut album Real Life, released earlier this year on British label Reveal Records, sounds like the work of a woman who has been singing and writing songs all her life. Rich and warm, and these days inspired more by the classic Memphis soul of Al Green than by punk rock, it's an impressive debut, with I Defy, her duet with Antony, one of the year's unexpected treasures.

Although the record has yet to be released in the US, Wasser has been too busy touring and lapping up acclaim in Britain and Europe to notice. For someone with her life story, the response to Real Life has been especially significant. "I've always felt like an outsider and a freak," she says, "and the fact that anyone likes the music that I make, makes me feel a little bit less like a freak. That's kind of a new feeling. The fact that once I let it out of my hands people handled it kindly, it just feels very caring." Being adopted can only partly explain Wasser's "outsider" experience. Her parents never tried to tame her rebellious phases.But, at 36, Wasser couldn't be more satisfied with where she is right now, continuing along the path that began in such sadness in 1997.

Joan As Policewoman: Me Jeff, and the Johnsons

Written by Paul Mitchell Thursday, 01 June 2006

"I still am going out with him, only problem is he�s dead and I�m not"

Joan Wasser is discussing her boyfriend. �I still am going out with him� she informs The Skinny, �Only problem is he�s dead and I�m not.� It�s a moment of genuine poignancy, and contrasts sharply with the manic enthusiasm which has preceded it - the kind of brashness that one imagines is a prerequisite for surviving the hyper-dynamic New York music scene.

Wasser or Joan As Police Woman (�A friend told me I reminded her of Angie Dickinson from the 70s cop show Police Woman; it�s the name I use to refer to my music in whatever guise�), is recounting the tale of the evening she first met her boyfriend, the sorely lamented Jeff Buckley. �It was 1994, my band [Boston-based art rockers the Dambuilders] was playing in Iowa, and so was Jeff. Afterwards, we went to one of those horrible after-show food halls. I guess it was easy to tell I wasn�t from Iowa City, I had on a big, brightly coloured hat, and three big jocks who were sitting there were making fun of me. Jeff went up to their table, stood over them and yelled �You wouldn�t know a woman if she slapped you in the face�. Shut them right up. It was the most romantic thing ever!�

It becomes obvious that Wasser retains the same intensity of commitment for her music. Despite her classical upbringing, an early fascination with punk and rock led to her enrolling at Boston University, as much for the city's reputation as a hot-bed of punk as well as the chance to join its celebrated symphony orchestra. �I played violin, but I adored watching bands like Sonic Youth and The Fall.� She would find that the subtleties and strictures of her classical training, far from being at odds with her genuine passion for rock music, could be interwoven to produce some fascinating, progressive sounds. When she moved to Brooklyn in 1996, she became embroiled in the avant-garde scene there, adding her input to the work of an array of impressive musicians.

After Buckley�s drowning in 1997, she joined with his remaining band mates to form Black Beetle, and suddenly found herself writing and performing her own songs. Eventually her solo shows would become her primary focus, and she releases her debut full-length album, �Real Life� on June 12th. However, she remains very much in demand for her vocal and instrumental collaborations, and arrives in the U.K (to support the Guillemots before some of her own headline shows and festival appearances) fresh out of Rufus Wainwright�s studio. Indeed, artists she has successfully associated with read like a who�s who of music industry darlings, and include Lou Reed, Scissor Sisters, Nick Cave, Sheryl Crow and as one of Antony�s Johnsons.

Her publicity people push these collaborations as a means of introduction, to facilitate some form of instant familiarity. Does she worry that she may become more renowned for these associations at the expense of her own material? �Not at all. I�m very proud of my work with all of these people, and it�s nice to be connected to that. I�d like to think my own work is different though, and should be recognised in its own right.�

Wasser writes all the music and Lyrics for Joan As Police Woman, playing guitar, piano, violin and Wurlitzer as she goes. �In the beginning I described my music as Punk Rock R&B� she says, �but as I�ve gone along I�ve started referring to it as American Soul.� Her multifarious influences make it very difficult (thankfully) to pin down her style, but as a chanteuse with an enigmatic, hazy charisma, frequent comparisons with Nina Simone don�t seem unjustified. If the plaudits continue in the same vein, it could be that she will soon attain a place in people�s hearts, in much the same way as her departed dream lover.

Goofy Joan grins and bears it!

Joan as Policewoman

Out of the shadows

Michael Dwyer September 29,2006

Sex and Violins