Joan As Police Woman

Embracing the motto that beauty constitutes the new punk rock, Joan Wasser, who records as Joan as Police Woman, creates songs distinguished by an uncommon blend of emotional openness and refined artistry. Her work merges two formative influences: the timeless soul of Al Green and Nina Simone alongside experimental underground groups extending from Sonic Youth through Bad Brains. After extensive experience as a sideman and collaborator, she stepped forward as lead artist with the emotionally direct 2006 debut Real Life. While later broadening her palette through the jazz elements of 2011’s The Deep Field, the 2021 partnership with Afrobeat pioneer Tony Allen titled The Solution Is Restless, and the wide-ranging reflections of 2024’s Lemons, Limes, and Orchids, the core of unguarded feeling in her music remained unmatched.

Wasser first touched piano at six and violin at eight during her Norwalk, Connecticut, schooling. At Boston University she trained under violinist Yuri Mazurkevich and performed in the Boston University Symphony Orchestra. She later ventured into rock via local outfits such as Hot Trix, whose members included Autoclave alum and Helium founder Mary Timony, and the Dambuilders, who achieved wider recognition. The latter band joined the 1995 Lollapalooza lineup behind Ruby Red, and Wasser contributed songwriting to 1997’s Against the Stars. Concurrently she appeared in Mind Science of the Mind with Timony and Shudder to Think’s Nathan Larson; the trio issued their self-titled album in 1996. After the Dambuilders dissolved in 1997, Wasser’s partner Jeff Buckley drowned accidentally in Memphis, Tennessee.

In the aftermath she sustained her career, serving as a session violinist for figures ranging from Sheryl Crow and Rufus Wainwright to Hal Willner while joining Grifters member Dave Shouse and Buckley’s former guitarist Michael Tighe in Those Bastard Souls for the 1999 Buckley tribute Debt & Departure. Wasser, Tighe, and additional Buckley band alumni next formed Black Beetle, granting her the first opportunity to front a group and write the bulk of its material. The project recorded an unreleased self-titled album before disbanding in 2002.

That same year Wasser launched Joan as Police Woman. The band’s debut single “My Gurl” surfaced in early 2003, followed by the Joan as Police Woman EP in 2004. Late in 2005 the act signed with Britain’s Reveal label, which released the full-length Real Life in June 2006; the United States edition arrived the following year. After guesting on Steve Jansen’s 2007 album Slope, Wasser issued Joan as Police Woman’s second record, To Survive, in 2008; it addressed her mother’s passing and included a guest turn from Rufus Wainwright. In 2009 she offered Cover, a set of reinterpretations of material by Jimi Hendrix, Britney Spears, and Sonic Youth, sold exclusively at shows and via the band’s website.

For the third album Wasser again worked with Real Life co-producer Bryce Goggin, shifting toward brighter textures that yielded 2011’s The Deep Field. She subsequently joined Beck onstage at his 2012 London Song Reader concert and composed runway music for Viktor & Rolf. In 2014, while delivering the exuberant vintage-soul homage The Classic, she also teamed with Bell X1’s Paul Noonan for the Printer Clips side project and produced the Scottish folk band Lau’s The Bell That Never Rang.

Wasser appeared with Placebo on their 2015 MTV Unplugged session and introduced 2001, her duo with Brooklyn multi-instrumentalist Benjamin Lazar Davis, via the single “Broke Me in Two.” After discovering shared experiences in Africa—Wasser having traveled to Ethiopia for Damon Albarn’s Africa Express project and Davis having studied traditional music in West Africa—the pair incorporated Central African Republic Pygmy patterns played on guitar and keyboards for 2016’s Let It Be You. In 2017 she performed alongside Daniel Johnston on one date of his final tour. The following year she returned with Damned Devotion, reverting to the spare approach of Real Life and To Survive. The 2019 retrospective Joanthology, containing a Live at the BBC set and previously unheard tracks, appeared in May.

She resurfaced in 2020 with Cover Two, another collection of interpretations featuring songs by Gil Scott-Heron, the Strokes, and Prince. That year she also contributed to Gorillaz’s Song Machine, Season One: Strange Timez. Through Albarn she met Tony Allen; after they performed Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free,” they chose to record together. Enlisting the Invisible’s Dave Okumu, the trio developed the core of the next Joan as Police Woman album through improvisation. Released in November 2021 and featuring Albarn, Meshell Ndegeocello, and Cole Kamen-Green among others, the intense The Solution Is Restless became one of Allen’s last recordings before his April 2020 death and received broad critical praise. Wasser subsequently taught at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music and toured as keyboardist and vocalist in Iggy Pop’s band before issuing Joan as Police Woman’s tenth album, Lemons, Limes, and Orchids, in September 2024. Incorporating jazz, electronic textures, pop, and R&B, the record’s reflections on love and contemporary life featured guitarist Chris Bruce, keyboardist Daniel Mintseris, drummers Parker Kindred and Otto Hauser, and Ndegeocello on bass.