Twenty years on, Joan Wasser still needs to make the music.
The Brooklyn-based singer and songwriter who records as Joan As Police Woman released her debut LP Real Life on June 12, 2006, a record she made with zero expectation that anyone beyond her immediate circle would hear it. They heard it. The Guardian called her voice "so wondrous and moving that it makes everyone else's seem ordinary and mundane." The Economist declared her one of the 21st century's best musicians. The record won the Independent Music Award for Best Pop/Rock Album in 2008.
Exactly two decades later, Wasser has reimagined and re-recorded her first album in full. Real Life Evolution (out June 12 on Reveal Records) features contributions from Iggy Pop, Krystle Warren, Parker Kindred, Thomas Bartlett and others, developed through years of live performance with her touring trio. Some transformations are subtle. Others have undergone a more radical transformation.
On the eve of the release, we spoke with Wasser about the memories stirred from such a revisitation and what else she has in the pipeline.
Analogue: This project must stir a lot, with so much distance between then and now. What's that been like for you to sort through these experiences and feelings?
Joan Wasser: You know, that record was a record I had to make for myself. It was my first album. I had made an EP and self-released it, sent it around to some people, no one wanted to release it. I manufactured it myself. I had zero expectation for what would happen with the album that would become Real Life. I figured my family and friends would hear it.
So when people really responded to it positively, I was not only pleased but surprised. And it helped me feel less alone—with these songs, with these feelings. It was very helpful in general, to my overall feeling of happiness and well-being and just comfort in the world, as a person, among people. It was like, 'Wow, okay, if people are relating to these songs and these feelings in these songs, I know that we all have gone through similar experiences.'
"I had zero expectation for what would happen with the album that would become Real Life."
That was then. Over time the songs have really... I've come to understand more what they're about. They've changed meaning for me at times, and some of them really stay very currently of that time. But I've been playing all of these songs for the last 20 years, some more than others, so it's not as if I'm returning to something I haven't been interacting with.
I was very grateful to allow myself to completely redo a few songs that really made sense in their feeling at the time but I felt really needed to be, for lack of a better word, lightened up. I'm older, but in a more comfortable way. I'm more comfortable with myself. I'm an emotive person, I'm not holding back, I never have. And so it's very clear how I was feeling in these songs. And I'm very glad I don't feel that way for certain ones. I feel like I've outgrown certain tracks through life, certain directions I may have been following. I feel like I'm in a better place.
Analogue: Which song has undergone the greatest metamorphosis?
Joan: Maybe "We Don't Own It." I think that feels much more how I feel about it now. "Feed the Light" is also quite metamorphosized. And "Christobel"... I've been working on that, I sort of completed that rework quite a while ago. That's maybe the song that if people haven't heard the rework, they would not recognize it until my vocals come in. And even then may not recognize it.
Analogue: You said you had to make that first album, that you didn't feel like a choice. Does that still feel true today?
Joan: Yeah, it really does. I didn't grow up thinking I wanted to be a singer or a songwriter. I grew up loving and being all consumed by music. I studied the violin and I really enjoyed finding ways to integrate the violin into pop music in a larger sense. And then I got to that time in my life and I needed to sing and I needed to write songs and it didn't feel like a choice. It felt like a necessity for survival, because the violin was no longer able to encapsulate my feelings, just who I was as a person and a music maker.
Analogue: You've got a run of Joe's Pub dates coming up and two of them already sold out. That's gotta feel good.
Joan: Joe's Pub has so much history for me. I've been playing there for so long. You know, New York shows are really overwhelming because they're where I live. And so every kind of person, every kind of relationship comes out of the woodwork. That's wonderful, but I'm usually like annoyed because it's like a birthday party where you want to hang out with everybody separately, but everyone's together and you don't feel like you're ever able to connect with each person. So, I mean, it does feel like that. But I am very much looking forward.
Analogue: How does a project like this actually come together? Have you thought about this for a while?
Joan: I had been on tour with a trio since the Lemons, Limes and Orchids album, and because it's such a small amount of people, we have to be very creative in how we present songs that on the recordings might have 75 tracks or something. And that's a really fun thing for all of us to do; it's like cooking, you know, what am I going to put in here? What am I going to leave out? What do I not need for this presentation?
So a lot of the arrangements were there already or were in motion from touring. Before I left for the final leg of that tour, I recorded all of the songs with the trio at one of our favorite venues that was actually about to close and is now closed. We made videos of those, and those are being released separately.
Then our last shows were in Istanbul and we recorded five or six of the songs there. And then the ones that weren't clear direction-wise, when I got back home I collaborated with Parker Kindred, who I've made music with for decades—he feels like my musical brother—and we blasted three of those out in one day in the studio. And then one I recorded here in New York with a friend at his studio, and one I used the live recording from those videos. It was all done in December and January. Very quick.
Analogue: Were you solely focused on this, or was new material coming alongside it?
Joan: For making this record, I was all in, because I had a really strict deadline. It was my life for a couple of months, because after the basics are done, I take them to my home studio, do all the strings, the keys, the synths, the vocals, the backup vocals, and a lot of the processing and editing before I give it to my mixer. It was just all in. And that kind of all in is really, really fun for me. I love having deadlines. I love having deadlines, because it means then I get things done.
Analogue: You mentioned Iggy Pop. You play in his touring band. What's going on beyond this record?
Joan: I was just in Los Angeles because I play with Iggy Pop. I play Wurlitzer and sing backups with him and that band. While I was in L.A., I did a bunch of writing with some of my favorite people for a new album, and I'm very excited about that. And then there are other projects. I'm part of this Moondog project that Ghost Train Orchestra does. We made an album a couple of years ago and performed it here and there.
And then, I mean, I said Iggy Pop is my only other project, but that's not true at all. Stephen Bernstein's Millennial Territory Orchestra does a Sly Stone project that we performed at Big Ears this year. With both the Moondog and the Sly project, the arrangements are spectacular, done by some of the best music makers and arrangers in New York. They're incredible.
VISIT: Joan As Police Woman
