Top of the Cops: Hot Press meets Joan As Policewoman

In her own upbeat way, Joan Wasser is getting antsy, sitting in New York, waiting for the temperature to rise. “Hopefully it’s going to melt all the disgusting piles of dirty-ass snow that are just everywhere and so gross. I’m ready for this stuff to change.” She’s sitting on an album, perhaps her most soulful and definitely her rawest to date, simply entitled The Classic. “I want to be writing classic songs for myself, so I might as well attempt to manifest them.” She’ll soothe your ego and tell you that she really enjoys this promotional malarkey, but her “heart” is in the practice space.

“I’d like to be in rehearsal about 23 hours a day and then sleep for an hour, but there’s about four zillion other things that I need to be doing… I guess I’d rather there were six more hours in the day.”

It’s little wonder that Joan wants to fully plunge into the process of bringing these songs on the road. After a decade ploughing a solo furrow – the Connecticut multi-instrumentalist previously spent her time playing with illustrious others – she was ready to record with her live show in mind. It meant her first time not working with veteran producer Bryce Goggins and keeping things very much in-band.

“After a lot of the live shows for The Deep Field, people would come up to me and say ‘wow that was so great, so powerful; so different from the record’. I was like ‘hold up, something’s getting lost here’. My aesthetic in recording had been quite polished. You know: ‘here, look what’s inside this snow globe’. I really wanted to get rid of the container and have it be much more explosive or raw.”

As for that seemingly swaggering album title? The artist couldn’t particularly care if it’s got the journos asking.

“I like to have fun, so that’s one way to definitely have fun – to name your record something very bombastic and cheeky.”

She admits that she buys into that “mystical” idea of a song, the notion that melodies are already out there, waiting to be discovered rather than created.

“It’s the most elusive art form. You can’t touch it, you can’t see it, and it happens in real time. A lot of times, 85% of the song will come in an hour. And then probably I’ll spend three months finding the last 15%. It’s one of the most amazing things about creating anything – be it music, a painting, whatever – before you made it, it didn’t exist! That sounds so dumb but… there was one point where ‘Tears Of A Clown’ hadn’t been written.”

It’s now 10 years since her decision to leave Antony & The Johnsons for the chance to open, solo, for Rufus Wainwright on the road. It’s not the route she envisaged herself taking.

“I would have not at all imagined that. It’s another one of those things that seems very mysterious: ‘shit, how did I get here?’ I’m really, really thankful to both Antony and Rufus for being so supportive of me. I really care what people that I highly respect think about my music.”

Top of that list was the late, great Lou Reed.
“I met him a long time ago and he was… unapproachable! And then, for some reason, he decided I was alright. This is not over a month, this is over many years and over working with him in many different settings. Something happened where he was like ‘yeah, she’s in’. I feel like with Lou, once you’re in, you’re in. He wasn’t a person that had a filter. I have a game face. Most of us do, just to get through life. He didn’t really have that and I feel like that left him extremely vulnerable to pain.

“He was somewhat of a mentor for me. He pushed me, really gently, in such a powerful way. I was doing this Neil Young tribute show. I was the musical director but I also sang a song myself and there’s this big huge extended violin solo. The first night after the show, Lou said ‘You’re really rippin’ on that solo… I wonder if you ever really let go’. I was like ‘oh man, Lou’s complimenting me!’, which he was. But then he was like ‘what else you got girl?’! The next night, it was like ‘Lou said I can let go’ and I did lose myself, where you feel like your body’s gone. He crossed the stage and he came right up to me. I thought he was going to say, ‘Joan make sure the horns aren’t too loud’ or whatever but he just said ‘that’s what I’m talking about’. I had to really work to not cry right then. So that’s who that person was for me.”

She still loves the company of fellow musicians. Another reason she’s itching to hit the road again. So much so that she ends with a scream. “GET ME OUT!” comes the roar from NYC. “I can’t wait.”

The Classic is out on now. Joan As Policewoman plays the Button Factory, Dublin on April 30.