Wasser Matters

On a muggy June afternoon, the womb-like interior of Dublin’s Tripod complex is the perfect backdrop for a conversation about life, death and sundry existential crises. Joan Wasser enters in civilian garb – she wears baggy jeans, spattered sneakers and an enormous hoodie – yet with an unmistakable rock diva aura. At close quarters, her cheekbones and boyish haircut lend her a slightly androgynous cast, but her laugh is flinty and down to earth. She chugs her take-out coffee like a teamster on his fifth beer.

“We played Cork last night,” sighs the 39-year-old Brooklynite, who, as Joan As Policewoman, has achieved a cultish following and might just be on the brink of something bigger. “The venue was nice, but it was next door to this pub that was full of jocks. I guess those people exist all over.”
We’re here to talk about her striking new record, a piano-mediated meditation on the passing of her mother, and several other private upheavals, entitled To Survive. But it’s by no means easy to get Wasser to open up – her chipper blokeyness is in part, you sense, a defence mechanism. She’s had to grow a thick hide: as the former girlfriend of Jeff Buckley, alt.culture’s pre-eminent Lost Boy, she’s spent most of her career skirting around the subject of personal catastrophe (Buckley will still be off-limits today).
“People keep telling me I’ve written such a morbid record,” she says. “And yeah, that’s one element. But it’s also a happy record – a very happy record in places. It documents two years in my life and, yes, my mother died and I’ve been very upfront about that. The thing is – so much else has happened to me during that time that has been so good. And that’s all in there too.”
Still, death is the LP’s defining theme. Wasser’s mother passed away in mid-2007 after a long battle with cancer. If Buckley’s demise was a sudden jolt – he drowned while swimming outside Memphis in 1997 – then this was a more drawn-out ordeal.
“Life is emotional,” Wasser observes. “There are things that we all go through. The death of a parent is one of them. Most of us will have to deal with it.”
In her civvies, she could pass for a backpacker with a voguish haircut, but lately Wasser has started to play with her femininity. In place of the rather tomboyish image cultivated for her 2006 debut, Real Life, she has taken to sporting chic designer dresses in her photo shoots (for her Tripod appearance she dons a metallic gown). Pouting at the camera in a parade of haute couture, she resembles those vaguely extraterrestrial models who were all the rage on the catwalk a few years back.
“I wish I could say there was a masterplan about what my image was going to be,” she laughs, “but I just wore the things that made me comfortable for the shoot. I guess I did go for a more glamorous sort of thing – ‘cos that’s part of me too, you know? I do try to soften my image all the time. I want to be like a fine cheese – ‘leave me out and let me soften’.”
She grew up in Norwalk, Connecticut, a commuter suburb an hour out of New York which is the birthplace of the song ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy).
“Some of those cities on the outskirts of New York are the poorest areas in the whole country and some of them are very rich,” she proffers. “I was lucky because where I grew up was extremely diverse. It had a population of 90,000 and was like a mini-New York really: you had all levels of money, peace and religion.”
In her early 20s, she studied violin in Boston where she was a protegé of the famous Yuri Mazurkevich,. Upon graduation she spurned a classical career to immerse herself in New York’s downtown music scene (though contrary to rumour she didn’t play on Nirvana’s Unplugged). At the time Wasser had little in the way of solo ambitions – she enjoyed guesting on other people’s records and was a regular in Buckley’s band. Following his death, she put together a group, Black Beetle, with the other members of his touring crew – the reviews were encouraging but they failed to gain much critical traction.
“By 2005 I’d decided I was going to play less with other people and finally concentrate on my own thing. That year, Rufus Wainwright asked me to tour Europe with him, which was just what I needed because it forced me to get out there and put together a repertoire that I could take on the road. And it was while playing in Birmingham that I met the guy who started putting out my records.”
On Real Life, Wasser broached the subject of Buckley’s passing but also wrote eloquently about America’s dysfunctional relationship with the rest of the world (the single ‘Eternal Flame’ functions both as a critique of American foreign policy and as an exploration of an obsessive relationship). She ratchets up the politics on To Survive, especially on ‘To America’, a Bush-baiting duet with Rufus Wainwright.
“I grew up on the East Coast, which is a very cultural part of America,” she resumes. “I don’t feel I have that much in common with people who grew up in the middle of the country, the ones who voted for George Bush. I am sympathetic towards them – that’s their life. They don’t know anything else. It’s just a different reality.”
She recalls a college roommate, a born against baptist who insisted that the world was only 6,000 years old and that Adam and Eve were actual historical figures.
“We were raised in very different situations and we drove each other crazy. But actually we were very similar people – our backgrounds were just so different.”
Did they stay in contact?
“Well, the last I heard she wasn’t out of the closet, but she’d come around to being a lesbian. She’s made peace with herself. Which goes to show: you never can judge by appearance. There’s a secret side to everyone!”