I had to spread the word- my buddy Joan Wasser dba JOAN AS POLICEWOMAN has really started getting attention in the UK and Europe! Look it up if you can - her debut cd has gotten excellant reviews.





UK reviews for REAL LIFE



THE TIMES - 10.06.2006
Joan as Police Woman - "Real Life" (Reveal)
'There might not be a better debut all year'

**** (4/5 stars)


Q MAGAZINE - 7.06 (Q recommends)

'Sublime debut.. flooringly beautiful.. absolutely devastating'

**** (4/5 stars)


UNCUT MAGAZINE - 7.06

'There i fire in the sophistication, could be Willie Mitchell producing a more melodic Kim Gordon'

**** (4/5 stars)


THE GUARDIAN - 27.05.06

'Joan Wasser is the best champagne in the world. A voice so wonderous and moving that it makes everyone else's seem ordinary and mundane, the indie generation's Dusty Springfield. The Ride is the most hypnotic and majestic sad song ever and so good it will make you shiver'

(Record Of The Week)


THE TELEGRAPH - 10.6.2006
Joan As Police Woman - "Real Life" (Reveal)

'For once a bizarre name flags a genuinely idiosyncratic talent. Real Life contains as much naked emotion as it does artful cleverness. A constant thrill'

THE SUN - 9.06.2006
Joan As Police Woman - "Real Life" (Reveal)

'I defy anyone to not to be smitten by Joan As Police Woman's highly original songs, the product of a woman with an open mind and her ears to the ground'

**** (4/5 stars)



THE GUARDIAN GUIDE - 10.6.2006

'A sedately - paced collection of beautifully sung torch songs, this feels like a quality band that will be playing in theatres pretty soon.. get in early'


from the Telegraph UK

Joan As Police Woman…

… is the odd name of Joan Wasser's mesmerising band. She tells Bernadette McNulty how sex and tragedy inspired her

Watch the video for Eternal Flame
Was it the prospect of uniforms that had so many men turning up to see the oddly-named band Joan As Police Woman on a balmy night in Dublin last week?

Were they curious fans of Antony and the Johnsons and Rufus Wainwright, two of the starry names with whom the band's lead singer, Joan Wasser, has collaborated? Or had they simply come along to catch a glimpse of the woman who was dating the legendary New York singer Jeff Buckley when he drowned in a tributary of the Mississippi back in 1997?

The moment Wasser began to sing, the answer was clear: her mesmerising voice - which swoops, purrs, growls, filling the room with an aching tenderness and joy - is worth crossing oceans to hear. It is also the reason why, only weeks after the release of her debut album, she already has a battalion of smitten fans who sing along, word perfect, to her jazz torch songs and soulful guitar numbers.

This and the fact that Wasser, with her sphinx-like face, halter-neck dress and white cowboy boots, oozes sexiness.

It's hard to believe that for most of her life Wasser (now 36) hardly sang at all. Shortly after being born in a home for unmarried teenage mothers, she was given up for adoption. At the age of eight she took up the violin and, a decade later, took a place to study music at Boston University before realising that the classical world was not for her.

"I didn't want to make classical music my life," she says. "The Beethoven symphonies have already been played a million times and I am not going to do it any better."

Instead Wasser, sporting dreadlocks and vinyl mini-dresses, started to play violin in punk bands. "It's hard to make a classical instrument fit into that world," she says, "but I wanted to bridge the gap between the guitar and the bass and play the violin really loud." In the grunge era, her band the Dambuilders were signed to a major label and toured the world.

Then, in 1997, Buckley died while swimming in Wolf River, Tennessee. It was, recalls Wasser, "such a traumatic experience of loss. I needed to grieve but I didn't know how." After the tragedy she spent some time with members of Buckley's band, playing violin with them and, for the first time, singing.


"I found singing terrifying at first," she says. "I didn't know about the boundaries of my voice and I had no idea what words I wanted to say. The violin had been my voice for so long."

A chance encounter in 1999 led to her becoming a member of last year's Mercury Music Prize winners, Antony and the Johnsons. "I was called up to stand in for another violinist but by the end of the rehearsal I was in the band.

"It was like a renaissance for me," she says. "With Antony's band I was surrounded by gentle people and quiet music. I had been so obsessed with being tough but suddenly I had a space to let go. Antony creates a stillness in his music that takes people out of their situation."

Around this time, Wasser also began to write her own material. "I wanted it to sound like old Al Green records. And I decided to do it without a record deal because I wanted to make music on my own terms."

With drummer Ben Perowsky and bass player Rainy Orteca, Wasser created Joan As Police Woman, taking the band's name from a '70s cop show.

"My friend said I was channelling Angie Dickinson in Police Woman and I loved that because she was really powerful but sexy at the same time. I also wanted the name to be funny because, although my music is serious, I like to laugh at tragedy."

After seeing Wasser support Wainwright in England last year, Derby record shop owner Tom Rose asked if she would be the first artist on his new label, Reveal. The trio's first album, Real Life, includes the new single Eternal Flame, an intoxicating pop swirl (no relation to the classic Bangles song) and an amazing funky duet with Antony Hegarty.

Now, like Wainwright and Hegarty, Wasser is finding a rapturous reception in Europe while still not being signed in the US. But she's happy on the road, looking forward to supporting Beth Orton in the autumn. "I love to play live because you meet people who are not cynical," she says, "and they give me hope."

'Eternal Flame' is released on Mon. Joan As Police Woman play the Spitz, London E1 (020 7392 9032), on Fri.
[Edited 8/5/06 8:26am]
[Edited 10/8/06 12:43pm]

I've heard the name and I will keep my ears open. I like the sound of her from your write up there.

another little bit for those interested.


The Sunday Times July 30, 2006

Joan as Police Woman is a lyrical force to be reckoned with.
By Robert Sandall

Old-fashioned or what? Joan Wasser is explaining why she doesn’t use electronic samplers: “What would that mean? I like the original stuff.” And why she prefers the sound of acoustic instruments, such as her five-stringed viola or acoustic guitar, played untreated and in real time: “Like on the old soul records.” Studio-manipulated recordings are her bugbear: “If you play all that stuff separately, it just doesn’t sound live. The most important thing about a song is getting it so the basics sound effortless.” Joan is no luddite: she has a toehold in the digital domain via her MySpace website, where, as I write, more than 28,000 visitors have tuned in to The Ride, a gorgeously dreamy tune that partly explains her site slogan, “Beauty is the new punk rock”.
But fast-track career-building is not her style. In the main, she has reached her small but growing audience the traditional way, by playing to them in attic clubs such as the Spitz, in east London, where she will be performing later this year. That is the way she has been doing it in her native America for the past 13 years, and the startling result has been the release over here of one of the most acclaimed debut albums by a complete unknown in recent memory. So far, there have been no dissenters. Q magazine called it “flooringly beautiful”, the broadsheet critics smothered it in stars and The Sun’s reviewer defied anyone not to be “smitten”.

Real Life by Joan as Police Woman hasn’t come out in the States yet because Wasser has never seen the point of chasing record companies. That we have had first dibs in Britain is down to the enthusiasm of a tiny independent label based in Derby, Reveal, which caught up with her when she supported the highly rated newcomers Guillemots earlier this summer. Emboldened by a spontaneously positive media response, Reveal is putting out a single from the album, Eternal Flame, on August 7, and Wasser has elected to stick around in Europe until Christmas to see what turns up.



Her patience is to some degree a product of her background and training. She grew up in Brooklyn and took violin lessons as a child. “I wasn’t a prodigy, playing Paganini at six. I wanted to play well, but I didn’t want to perfect music that had already been written and already perfected.” Later, studying music at Boston University, she loved the unusual harmonies of the great moderns: Shostakovich, Bartok and Schnittke. But instead of obsessing over the established repertoire, she set out to play pieces composed by her teachers. “Nobody wanted to play them except me. I liked them because they were new.” Once she had graduated, playing “new” led her back to the sound of her adolescence: hard rock. Boston in the early 1990s, she says, “was a time when, following the success of the Pixies, arty bands got signed”. Gigging with her first group, the Dambuilders, she had her two violins stolen and, unable to afford replacements, stumbled across her true love, a five-stringed viola, in a second-hand shop. “It’s like a violin that can play lower. I found I liked the lower, emotional stuff better than the high-filigree violin.”

A brief flirtation with punk “comfortably released” her residual teenage anger and cleared the way for the vintage soul of Al Green and Donny Hathaway. “It changed my life when I got into that music, how raw it was and open.” She dabbled in side-projects, with members of the Grifters and the Flaming Lips, and, in 1994, started going out with a fellow musician whose influence can be heard, with aching poignancy, at various points on Real Life. Wasser met Jeff Buckley while they were appearing on a triple bill in Iowa City, and they were together until his death by drowning in 1997. That shattering event forced the break-up of the Dambuilders and led to Wasser forming a new group, Black Beetle, with two of Buckley’s band.

The next big figure she encountered on her path to Joan as Police Woman was Antony Hegarty, of Antony and the Johnsons. Drafted in for one rehearsal as a substitute string-player, she was promptly hired — and instantly loved it. “I’d been playing really loud music for a long time, and here I was in this band that was really quiet, with other string-players. It was like returning to chamber music, a space where everyone was really gentle and sensitive with each other.” She considers Hegarty “one of the greatest singers living”. The pair remain close friends, and the outstanding track on Real Life is their stunning duet, I Defy. Above a bed of gently churning horns and gospel voices, Wasser here tries to argue Hegarty out of his habitually self-effacing attitude. “He’s extremely modest. I’m really just saying, ‘Please stop putting yourself down.’”

Her next employer suffered no such qualms. “Oh, Rufus Wainwright,” she squeals. “That person is a force of nature. He had me playing a load of different string instruments and singing really complicated harmonies all at the same time, on stage. It’s like being an orchestra — you just have to figure out a way of doing it.” Wainwright’s manically extrovert approach drove her to take the plunge into solo performance in 2005. She had the songs, she had shed her early terror of hearing herself sing and she had also acquired a rather groovy name. It was suggested by a friend, who noticed her similarity to Angie Dickinson, the star of the 1970s television show Police Woman. “It was kinda like Charlie’s Angels but grittier. And yeah, I was ready to be Joan as Police Woman, a woman kicking butt.” Wasser laughs heartily.

For most of the time she’s on stage at the Spitz, she mesmerises rather than pulverises the audience. Whether beauty really is “the new punk rock” or not, these emotionally sophisticated, engagingly hummable songs are drenched in the stuff. “I thank God I challenged myself to play by myself,” she says afterwards. “I used to just close my eyes when I played the viola in a band. Trusting yourself enough to know you can make a connection with the audience is hard, but what a gift it is to get all that energy from them.” With more dates and a new album in the autumn, there should be plenty more of that energy coming Wasser’s way soon.







Irish Times, Ireland - Jul 21, 2006
The Ticket.

Joan as Policewoman has taken her time finding a voice. Now the ex-partner of Jeff Buckley and former member of Anthony & the Johnsons has graduated from experimental violin playing to giving nuanced vocal performances that are catching the public imagination. She talks to Tony Clayton-Lea

SHE is known to family, friends and nice people in authority as Joan Wasser, but to the world at large (or at least those who know her music and her associations with Rufus Wainwright and Antony & the Johnsons) she is known by the title of Joan as Policewoman. Interesting name, interesting person, even more interesting background.

Those with more time on their hands would know Wasser when she was an integral part of such US bands as The Dambuilders, Those Bastard Souls and Black Beetle. Joan was part of the new music scene set hanging around Boston and other East Coast cities. She studied classical violin at Boston University and was good friends with the likes of Mary Timony and Nathan Larson. (Timony is a former member of Autoclave and Helium, Larson is a movie soundtrack specialist, a member of tipped new act Hot One, and partner of The Cardigans' Nina Persson). She was also, once, more than just good friends with Jeff Buckley.

We're talking nascent and organic scene makers here - people who get into music for the love and passion of it, not because it might make them famous for, ooh, let's see, a few minutes and a reality show.

"I was studying classical music, but I was also exploring the instrument through other areas," says Joan. "Expanding it within a rock band, playing it through different amps and effects, learning how it worked in a band situation so that you're playing melodies with it in concert with other instruments. Making it part of the fabric."

About eight years ago Joan started singing, but only to herself. She thought her voice sounded foreign and strange. "I was quite unused to it as a singing voice, as an instrument. At least, that's the way I felt. No one heard it for a little while, but I eventually learned to use it in solo shows, because some of the songs I was writing were too intimate for a band setting. I kept playing solo for some time, but then I joined Antony's band in 1999. We were touring and then, in 2004, Rufus asked me to support him and then join his band. And through them quite a few more people got to see what I was doing with my solo music."

Which leads us swiftly on to JaP's debut solo album, Real Life. Outwardly, it's a mixture of too many styles that threaten to tumble down at the touch of a remote control or the swirl of an iPod dial. But look behind the obvious and you'll find a dignified work, musically and lyrically, of true modern class.

"I have this need to express myself very honestly, which is something I didn't do for a long time. First of all, playing an instrument is still very different to me from singing. It expresses something different within me, and now that I've started singing it seems very freeing to be able to be raw and honest with my emotions. I avoided them for such a long time with lots of screeching, distorted violin. Go figure that.

"I'm not saying that the only way in which I can express emotions is through playing my violin - that's not the case at all. But when I began singing I started to realise I was not very good at interpreting my own feelings. When I started to explore that it was amazing for me, because I'm quite confident and gregarious, and never had a problem expressing my opinions on anything.

"All of a sudden, though, I'm singing, and I'm thinking, what do I want to sing about? Do I believe in what I'm singing? So there then came a massive filtering system, from the source of the emotion to the expression, and I tried to get rid of that filter through learning how to sing and how to be honest to myself about what I was doing."

Facing her fears and transposing those experiences into songs is something that Wasser has long been adept at. Ultimately, she says, when you face fears they're a lot less scary than you might think, and the barriers are worse than what could be hiding behind the wall. It was all about her growing up through a painful but extremely rewarding time, she admits in a voice that drifts in and out of slight nervousness.

"I'm a very disciplined person, and when I put my mind to something I will force myself through it. I have learned that you don't know what you're going to get until you've gotten within reach of your goal. There have been little things along the way that have given me a heads-up to ecstasy - and it does feel like that when you rid yourself of a lot of stuff you don't need.

"I try to keep focused, too. You get paid back when you begin to treat yourself better, because you then treat the people around you better, and you get more positive responses from them. That gains momentum, and you then know that you're doing the right thing."

It would be wrong, she implies (and her background clearly proves) that any sudden appearance on her part in the public eye is due to the semi-mainstream successes of Wainwright and Antony. They've been beneficial to her, she agrees, but they were not the impetus. She's is no longer in Antony's band, anyway. "I left before he gained major success. I saw that take off and watched him become quite a massive commercial proposition, which was very exciting. But it would be unfair of people to say that Antony was instrumental in my own success.

"That said, I attribute him with making my life a better place. When I met Antony I was in an almost trauma situation in my life [ Wasser was going out with Buckley at the time of his tragic death from drowning in 1997] and meeting him and joining his band changed my life for the better in many ways. Also, collaborating with him was something of a renaissance for me. I was reunited with playing quiet, chamber-like music and being part of an ensemble band set-up that was concerned with space, being gentle and soft. It really helped me through a very difficult time in my life."

She's quite touched at this stage, her nervousness replaced by the very thing, perhaps, that prompted her to talk about her fears. "I thank Antony for my life. How much he is perceived to be a part of my record or my career is outside my control, but I will always be thankful to him and feel very lucky to know him."

Wasser has been in Dublin before, both as support to and part of Wainwright's band. She's looking forward to returning on what will be, she lets slip, her 36th birthday. "I'm planning on having the time of my life." Someone get a cake ready - we feel a party coming on.




www.myspace.com/joanaspolicewoman

another review from her residency @ the SPITZ in London



Flashing off her new blue dress, all shiny ochre and low cut, and joking about the "bizarre gardening accident" that forced her drummer to miss last night's gig in Bristol, Joan Wasser looks like the proverbial cat with her paw in the cream. A world away from the somewhat morose figure on her promotional material, she exudes the glamour and confidence of an experienced performer at ease with her craft.

And Wasser is certainly experienced - earning her chops backing everyone from Lou Reed to Rufus Wainwright, and as a regular Johnson to Antony Hegarty (who guests on her current album "Real Life", on the slow burning "I Defy"). A former lover of Jeff Buckley, and rumoured to be his fiancée at the time of his drowning, she's had her share of tragedy too. This is apparent the moment she breaks into a solo version of "To Be Lonely", from her debut EP. The room goes silent. Only the sound of a healthy lesbian quotient, craning their necks forward to grab a better look, breaks the still air.

Wasser has a stunning and dramatic voice, not unlike Joanna Newsom (if Joanna Newsom had done time in Brooklyn bars rather than pixie-inhabited backwoods). Smoky and lived in, but clear as a bell, it skirts the edge of emotions - skipping witty and delightful through "Eternal Flame" (this year's great forgotten radio single) before veering sultry and moody on "The Ride". Her alter ego is taken from a '70s US cop show, and Wasser swipes her influences from that era too: Leonard Cohen, Rickie Lee Jones and Laura Nyro. Classy and classic singer songwriters.

The only carp is her backing band - bassist Rainy Orteca and drummer Ben Perowsky - who add either far too little, or not quite enough. Their spartan accompaniment is occasionally intrusive, and at times you're left wishing for a solo performance, or that Wasser would really gild the lily with orchestras, harps and bells. Certainly, "Save Me" lacks the dramatic punch of its recorded incarnation (with a piano riff as memorable as Talk Talk's "Life's What You Make It", and a breathy and theatrical high pitch refrain) and "I Defy" suffers from an obvious lack of Antony.

Still, these are minor issues. Sitting at that perfect equilibrium between underground and mainstream, Wasser has the potential to cross over big time. She's unlikely to, of course (no clever commercial with bouncing colour balls; no TV ad budget comparable with Ray LaMontagne) but, encoring to wild applause, you feel she might not have to play venues this intimate forever.

by Adam Webb


+++++

an interview from a recent festival gig

http://www.bbc.co.uk/leic...ture.shtml

Joan As Policewoman Q&A
By Becca Bryers

Brooklyn band Joan As Police Woman played at this years Summer Sundae to a packed out Jim Beam Rising Tent. Becca caught up with the chilled out Joan for a few words on her musical lifestyle...
[Edited 8/19/06 11:25am]

NEW INTERNATIONAL TOUR DATES







September


16 Lille @ FNAC

19 Lyon BELLECOUR @ FNAC

20 Bordeaux @ FNAC

21 Paris TERNES @ FNAC

22 Strasbourg @ FNAC

27 Sydney - Newtown, Australia

29 Melbourne @ Northcote Social Club

30 Melbourne @ Northcote Social Club


October

10th - TONIC - NEW YORK - USA

12th- Cervantes Theatre- Malaga- Spain

20th- Rost-Copenhagen- Denmark

21st - KB- Malmo-Sweden

22nd- Sodra Teatern -Stockholm-Sweden

23rd- Pusterviksbaren - Goteborg - Sweden

24th -John Dee- Oslo- Norway

30th- Santiago Alquimista -Libson



November
3rd Green Space Valencia Spain

4th Teatro Circo Jazz festival Cartagena Spain

8th - Festival Inrockuptibles Maison Folies Lille France

9th Festival Inrockuptibles La Boule Noire Paris France

10th La Laiterie Strasbourg France

12th Le Ciel Grenoble France

14th PTR LUsine Geneva Switzerland

15th Moods Zurich Switzerland

18th Haarlem Patronaat Holland

19th Kunst Hamburg Germany

20th Lido Berlin Germany

21st Prime Club Koln Germany

22nd Botanique Brussels Belgium

23rd Nachtleben Frankfurt Germany

25th Atomic Café Munich Germany

26th Flex Vienna Austria

28th Arena Del Sole Bologna Italy

29th Hiroshima Mon Amour Turin Italy



December


2nd Fuori Orario Emilia Regio Italy

3rd Teatro Studio Rome Italy

9th Village Dublin Ireland

10th Spring and Airbrake Belfast Ireland

11th Roisin Dubh Galway Ireland

12th Cyprus Avenue Cork Ireland

16th Laika Club Athens - Greece
[Edited 9/16/06 9:37am]

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.

Out of the shadows
September 29, 2006



After backing Jeff Buckley and many others, Joan Wasser has found strength in the spotlight, writes Michael Dwyer.

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."
[Edited 10/1/06 13:32pm]

i like it.