interview by Angelina Adsmill | view as PDF

It was late last summer whilst living in Montréal when Angelina Adsmill first wrapped an ear around the eponymous EP from talented trio Joan As Police Woman, fronted by the inimitable Joan Wasser. One year later, she and Joan found themselves surrounded by the glow of an unusually sunny afternoon in London (not the Ontarian one) tasked with the incredibly taxing job of talking about their most favourite things. Nice work if you can get it, eh? But first, some background…

Like a diamond dodecahedron, Joan Wasser is a jewel of many faces. A multi-instrumentalist by the age of eight, she went on to assume full mastery of the violin, playing with the Boston University Symphony Orchestra before trading in a life of recitals for something rawer. She spent a short while playing alongside indie rock heroine Mary Timony (Helium, Autoclave) in one of her formative bands Hot Trix and in other local outfits, most notably The Dambuilders in which she broadened her musical palette and further developed her dramatic playing style on the violin.

After several albums and some modest success on the indie circuit, the band split in October 1997, just a few months after Joan’s former bandmate and close friend Jeff Buckley drowned in a Memphis river. In the wake of this tragedy, Wasser formed Black Beetle alongside former Buckley stalwarts, Michael Tighe and Parker Kindred of Those Bastard Souls, though the project was short-lived. Ever since, Joan’s musical talents, both vocal and otherwise, have been in constant demand and her résumé to date includes live performances and studio work with everyone from Lou Reed, Dave Gahan and Elton John to fellow songstresses Tanya Donelly, Juliana Hatfield, Nina Persson and Sheryl Crow, all adding strings of kudos to the bow of her impressive career. Already a favourite of BBC 6Music due to her gorgeous reinterpretation of David Bowie’s Orwell-inspired Sweet Thing, Joan shares with the rock chameleon a strong sense of characterisation and exploring different personalities. In fact, you’ve probably never heard anything quite like her.

Joan As Police Woman make music that’s accessible yet instinctively magical, dripping with sophisticated nuance. Listening to that first EP last summer, the first image to flood my senses was of a darkened room, an almost subterranean space illuminated note by quavering note as if each were a flicker of a scrappy neon light. Vocals hummed, purred and quickly swelled free of that prison’s brittle confines and as the songs racked up the intensity-o-meter, Wasser demolished the slimy walls of that dank, grim habitat, unveiling a vista of a primeval landscape. Here, I found the sounds of cool, rushing streams galore and loves so fresh that mankind hasn’t yet had a chance to name them, let alone clutter them with modern contrivances.

For an artist who writes “life” under ‘influences’, Joan has foregone the naïve idealism of youth and has emerged with an album that’s fully formed, wistful yet hopeful, tainted yet pure. Why buy a packet of seeds when you can have Real Life, a giant blooming bunch of flowers? As Joan herself sings on the recent single The Ride, “starting now, the wait is over.”

Early reviews of the album have been unanimously superlative, and Joan’s astonishing voice has been privy to most of the praise, with several commentators comparing her melodious sounds to the legendary queens of torch song melodrama, people like Dusty Springfield and Nina Simone. “Probably the most emotional instrument that exists is the voice,” she enthuses. “I spent a long time expressing myself through violin, which is also one of the more expressive instruments. And that was really great, but then it was sort of like I needed more and that’s kind of why I started singing.”

Indeed, while Joan’s musical background may be more notable for her instrumental contributions than her vocal prowess, it appears to me that the ease with which her bow glides over the strings has translated to her vocal skills, using her voice as much as the instrumentation in order to build a variety of moods. I wondered whether Joan had ever considered that her singing style might perhaps be an unconscious imitation of her string-based experiences. “I don’t know,” she shrugs. “I mean, I can’t say, because I’ve never thought about trying to imitate the violin. It probably happens naturally because I’m so used to that instrument and working with it. But what I’m trying to get across in the song is the source of the emotion, so I hope that it evokes it as much as possible.”

Listening to Real Life, it’s plainly apparent that the girl done good; there’s certainly no shortage of emotion running through the album’s ten-strong clutch of songs. Though it’s a considerably more chilled out affair than the earlier EP, it’s all the more cohesive for it, allowing the music to not only service and carry the narrative but also to encapsulate an almost indescribable feeling, one that imparts great knowledge in a single instant. “That’s cool,” she beams. “One of my first influences in writing that I really connected with and loved were those Hemingway vignettes, like 'In Our Time'.”

Like Hemingway, Joan’s lyrics are not wholly unlike those of a talented news reporter. They still adhere to certain constructs, of course, in that they repeat and serve a collective purpose, but they pack plenty in the punch department. Unlike some of her more verbose and flowery peers, Joan is positively economical. But even though she might use just six words in a lyric, you can be damn sure that they’re the right six words for what she wants to convey.

Delve a little deeper into her words and you’ll find a sweetly profound sense of introspection, as if Joan had come to the realisation that what she perhaps had seen and wanted to gravitate towards in others was something that she’d possessed all along — talent, confidence, that voice! But perhaps I’m reading too much into such things. “The thing is,” she says, “for me, that’s what’s great about making music and making music that is open in that way; I sort of count on the listener to make it their own. I have my own experiences and I try to get the feeling across, but I try not to force an interpretation.”

Instincts, then, are what drive this lady’s muse. But does she always trust them? “You know, it never really sounds true if it doesn’t come from the instinctive part of you,” she admits. “If I ever try to write something like someone else, it never sounds like that other person. I’ll think of it, like, ‘Oh, I want to have this sort of feeling’. But if I ever told someone I tried to write a Bob Dylan song, they would say, ‘whoa Joan! That doesn’t sound anything like it.”

“You know, a lot of my friends listen to music in a certain way that I realise I don’t. I just listen to it most of the time as a big whole. I mean, I notice the guitar sound, or that they used an oboe at the end, or whatever, but I don’t notice all that much. I guess it’s more the general overriding feeling. Like, I really loved Al Green recordings, but I didn’t go back and listen to it and be like, ‘okay, the strings came in right at this part of the song to highlight whatever’, you know? I just sort of trusted myself to remember, inherently, somewhere within me, where things would…should happen.”

Having self-imposed a sabbatical with regard to her own recording ambitions for so long — most recently as a member of Rufus Wainwright and Antony & The Johnsons’ touring party, lending her multi-instrumental skills to these two exponents of the new New York cabaret scene — I wonder whether Joan is comfortable and ready to step out of the shadows and into the limelight? “Just changing my focus from being an instrumentalist who plays with other people to being the songwriter and singing, I really had to learn what I thought about myself. I know that sounds silly, but previously I had spent a lot of time expressing my opinion — I’m an extrovert and have no problem talking to anyone and telling them what I feel. But then as soon as I started writing songs and singing, I realised I really didn’t know what I thought and I didn’t know what I wanted to say, so I didn’t know, really, anything! So, I started a process of learning who I was, which was really terrifying at times, but eventually an extremely rewarding process.”

I suggest that Real Life is quite aptly named as a psychological journey of self-discovery. “Yeah, it’s about looking inside and realising that, like you said, the qualities you’re attracted to in other people are usually things that you want to expand in yourself in some way, or that you feel are in you.”

Certainly, there’s a delightful sense of educated blind abandon that runs throughout the album. Joan may have experienced the vicarious thrills and disappointments of working alongside so many artists (Antony returns the favour on Real Life’s fantastic I Defy), but she still exudes an innocent willingness to surrender herself to her own musical fate. “That’s so great!” she beams. “That’s perfect. I’m gonna use that now, ‘educated blind abandon’. That’s totally what it is, yeah!”

Real Life is one of those modern classic-sounding albums that will, inevitably, be hailed as instantly timeless. Joan As Police Woman have sidestepped the knowing wink of postmodernism, bringing fresh life to familiar scenarios through virtue of their vision alone, as if Wasser were viewing an old world through new eyes. She laughs appreciatively. “I don’t know how to wink. I’m glad I don’t. There’s no time for winking!”. It leads to nervous twitches I say and she laughs again, “that’s right! That’s right!”

Although forging ahead with her own career, Joan still finds time to lend her skills to other projects, including Hal Wilner’s new sea shanties (also known as ‘chanteys’, depending on who you ask) project, Rogue’s Gallery. “Hal puts together these amazing projects. He’s put together these sea shanties, old sea songs, not only from England, Ireland and New England, but also from the West Indies and Africa. There were six sessions: London, Dublin, Seattle, San Francisco, LA and New York. I was the musical director for the New York sessions, which meant I got to choose the band and got a lot of the performers to come in; Antony, Joseph Arthur, Rufus, Mark Anthony, Teddy Thompson, White Magic, No Matter and myself. A lot of people were involved and we’d just sort of make it up right there. It was really fun.”

Was there any kind of musical democracy when handing out the songs? “Hal sent me 156 songs and he did a lot of choosing, like, ‘one of these four for this person’ and then the performer also listens and says, ‘I want to do this’ or ‘I’d rather do this’. The band didn’t know a lot of the songs beforehand, so we just had to make it happen which was fun. The people I got to play are amazing; Jim White from the Dirty Three playing drums and Ed Pastorini, all these just amazing New York people that you don’t really know about. Just extraordinary musicians. Rainy [Orteca, Joan As Police Woman’s bassist] played guitar in the band because she’s just this insane guitar player, so it was really fun.”

Recording is usually a laborious process so such efficiency for what is essentially an improvisational concept album must have been rather liberating. “Exactly!” she nods. “I mean, one day we did eight songs.” I suggest that it often takes eight days to do — at which point she knowingly joins in with — “one song!” before continuing, “no, it’s true. It’s really thrilling and you’ve worked for sixteen hours and you don’t even know what’s happened. You’ve lost total ability to rationalise time and food intake.”

She leans in, almost whispering, as if she’s about to impart some top insider secret, “I think that it’s sorta being paid for by Johnny Depp”. You mean Hollywood’s super-cool maverick actor has invested more than a few rock ‘n’ roll affectations into his role as Pirates Of The Caribbean’s dry-witted reprobate Captain Jack Sparrow? “I think so. I mean, I don’t totally understand it, but it’s cool that he’s a supporter of nutty musical projects.”

Well, be it sane or otherwise, Joan’s involvement is quality assurance enough for me. For now though, she’s due back on the deck to prepare for the evening’s show (during which a cover of What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor was, sadly, not forthcoming) while I head home to port.

In a letter home to his father, Hemingway once wrote “I’m trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across — not to just depict life — or criticise it — but to actually make it alive.” The music of Joan Wasser and her two compatriots positively seethes with the exact same spirit, a desire to transcend the usual listening experience and bring you something of substance, something you can treasure. Get a living, breathing real life. Buy this record.

Real Life is out now on Reveal Records. Rogue’s Gallery: Pirate Ballads, Sea Songs & Chanteys featuring Jolie Holland, Lucinda Williams, Mary Margaret O'Hara and more is out now on Anti-.