Monte Dube interviews Joan Wasser, known as Joan as Police Woman, at the Big Ears Music Festival in Knoxville, Tennessee. They discuss her musical journey, starting with her early violin lessons in New York and her passion for music that led her to explore punk rock. Joan shares how her experiences at iconic shows shaped her artistic identity, highlighting her deep connection to music throughout her life. (Interview date: 3/29/2025)
Monte Dube: This is Monte Dube from KGNU, and I’m coming to you today from beautiful Knoxville, Tennessee, where we’re about to start day three of the four Day Big Ears Music Festival. And I am thrilled to be joined this morning by Joan Wasser, who’s been going by the name Joan as Police Woman for two decades plus.
Joan As Police Woman: Thank you. Great to be here.
Monte Dube: Thank you. One of the greatest things about Big Ears is with the 200 or so artists. There are a bunch that you discover.
Joan As Police Woman: Yeah.
Monte Dube: So I discovered you when I was looking at bios and then was attracted to your name and it piqued my curiosity. And so I’ve been listening to a lot of your albums and looking at your unbelievable videos, and I’m a fan, so better late than ever. So for our listeners who aren’t familiar with your body of work, do you wanna maybe take a New York minute or three to give us your origin story?
Joan As Police Woman: I grew up near New York City. Started playing violin in third grade ’cause they offered it in public school. That was the seventies. And just took to it and my teachers said “she got talent.” So I just kept doing that. I studied that through college. When you study violin the classical repertoire, which is amazing. But I was also very interested in, and just really obsessed with music since I have been breathing. I got really into the punk rock scene when I was really early on, saw some just incredible shows that changed my life really early. I think my two first shows were The Bad Brains and Black Flag. And then my first big show in New York was Adam and The Ants. I was lucky to have grown up near a lot of music. When I was studying classically, I just took every opportunity to play my instrument outside the classical formula or whatever. And when you study classical violin, you study by reading off a page. I had to learn how to, while I had been listening to music and hearing music for so long, to change your brain from reading notes off a page, to trusting your ears. That was really fun and of course very scary at the time. I haven’t thought about that time in so long. And then I joined bands. The one that stuck was this band called the Dam Builders. Most of the guys were from Hawaii originally. We made a lot of records. I learned a lot about recording that way. The guitar player had a 16 track, two inch machine, and so I just learned all about that. That was really fun. Moved to New York in the mid nineties and just was immersed in the music scene and a lot of different scenes in music. A lot of stuff happened there, but I ended up teaching myself how to play guitar and keys and I started singing mostly out of necessity. I was dealing with a lot of personal tragedy and it was really the only, the violin was not enough to express the emotions I had. And I had to just start singing even though it was appalling to me and I didn’t ever wanna be a singer.
Monte Dube: You’ve said music has saved your life.
Joan As Police Woman: Yeah. So I just pushed through ’cause I felt like I had to, and now I’ve made 10 albums or something like that. 12 something. One of them’s an anthology. I played with Anohni from ‘98 to 2004. We made that record I Am a Bird Now together. Saw her perform last night. That was amazing. And then went on the road with Rufus and was opening for the first time, like for a larger audience with my own music. That was in 2004. Toured with him for the Want One and Want Two albums. And then I got picked up in England and in Europe by a large indie there. Then I just haven’t, I haven’t stopped.
Monte Dube: So you’re a New Yorker. You played Lincoln Center last week. Was that kind of unbelievable for you?
Joan As Police Woman: It was the room with the massive floor to ceiling windows that look out onto 59th Street. It looks like a backdrop. And the park, in the Central Park.
Monte Dube: It’s great to be recognized like that in your hometown. You’ve said that music has been essential in your life to maybe work through stuff including passings of beloved people. Your mom, you did a song, an album for her in ‘08. You were working on a song with I think Tony Allen, the great drummer who passed.
Joan As Police Woman: I made an album with him. The Solution Is Restless. That comes from an improv that we did in 2019. And then Covid hit and I had that music from the improv that we did in Paris, and I took that music and I chopped it all up and made songs for that record. Which kept me sane during Covid. But yeah, all four of my parents are gone and a lot of my closest people. So yeah, it helps.
Monte Dube: And you’re a professor, aren’t you? Not a full professor.
Joan As Police Woman: I teach at NYU, yeah. And I teach one-on-one with the seniors. And yeah, it’s really great. It’s very hopeful, especially at times like this. Where popular music doesn’t appeal to me, most of it. So it’s nice to hear music coming out of young people that’s just very creative. Many of them have a lot of interest in the past and in musical history, which doesn’t feel so true for a lot of people who think that music just comes from TikTok. No one makes it, it just emanates, somehow. Springs fully formed from TikTok. Yeah. That’s really rewarding.
Monte Dube: I imagine your new album didn’t spring forth out of nothing. What was the germ of that? How long were you working on that before you realized you had an album?
Joan As Police Woman: Each time it feels a little bit magical where I think I don’t have anything. And then. I start to gather the pieces that I’ve been working on since the album before, and then all of a sudden, I usually have to write a lot, but there’s solid form there before I really realized that there is. So this album has been, I’ve been writing it basically since the last album. Which came out in 2021. So yeah, I toured a lot on that album. And then I tour a lot in general. Parker Kindred and Otto Hauser both on drums. We recorded it in the last four days of 2023. Live in the studio upstate New York, and then I did another month or so on it on my own in New York. And then there you go.
Monte Dube: You have been for years, a multi instrumentalist this is a very voice forward album. It was soulful and sensuous and slow. Yeah. And also very dreamy. You use the word dream in a lot of your songs. You have a song called The Dream and Full-Time Heist. “Dream up your whole shape. Dream of who I am. With hope in my breath, it’s did I dream you or are you of this place.” It’s pretty dreamy, intentional or?
Joan As Police Woman: Non-intentional. I think it was a coming out of the pandemic and realizing that we were all, that the entire world hadn’t died. That was helpful to feel hope. I think a lot of us felt hope. And I have a pretty, hope actually is a bad word. I felt optimistic.
Monte Dube: Hope a bad word?
Joan As Police Woman: I’ve been down on hope recently. It just feels not reality based and maybe a bit egocentric. Because it feels like, often there’s an idea that you could have agency in someone’s life and that’s not fair to the other person or yourself. And so I’m just going with optimism, which feels different and maybe there are other words that work. But I don’t wake up in a terrible mood usually otherwise. I usually wake up feeling pretty good about, especially about coffee.
Monte Dube: There’s a lot of ebb and flow in this album, and not just ebb and flow, but oceanic feeling, and here we go again. Words, and this may be, something you realize as you were writing this, you talked about an “impossibly gorgeous shore, the water’s warmer than you could ever have imagined.” By the way, we have no control at all, is what you said after that. “It started off free.” You said, “I don’t have to tame it. Love, watch it run to the sea. It needs to swim. Alone.” And in Oh, Joan. “What’s there to be done? Oh Joan, I heard the whip of the ocean.” And then if I can stay fluid for a second, “help is on its way. The water’s getting higher, dirtier, full of stuff that kills us.” Are you, what is it, Aquarius? What’s the most, the water?
Joan As Police Woman: No. I’m a Leo, but I don’t really subscribe to these things. But I do, I am very moved by the water, that’s for sure.
Monte Dube: One of the rivers.
Joan As Police Woman: Yeah. I can always see the water right now actually, I can’t see the water, but I’m very close to it.
Monte Dube: I gotta talk for a second about more than a second, about Lemon, Limes and Orchids title of your album and, I would say, maybe the centerpiece of it. It’s six plus minutes. And it’s gorgeous. It is both very dark and foreboding. You talk about filthy peels and scare you senseless and dangerous intersections. It’s a little scary and when I listen to it, it sounds like a slow, gentle lullaby. Wanna talk a little bit about what you were creating there?
Joan As Police Woman: Yeah. That’s a reminiscence of a time in my life when I was really sad a long time over 20 years ago. And I had lost faith in why I was here or something, and I would just wander around the west side, which was not developed at all the west side of Manhattan. The part of which I was wandering around in was not developed. And there’s just a feeling over there. It was not particularly beautiful. The way people think of beautiful, but I found it very beautiful ’cause I love cities. And I love humanity even when it’s not pretty. And there were a lot of people that weren’t doing great over there. And then there were just a lot of poorer people that were doing okay, but just working really hard. And, but there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of desolation over there which you’d be surprised to see just is completely gone. Now it’s just full of brand new buildings. But I just found myself over there just walking and walking for hours. And I think I was just trying to figure out how to keep living. And I take writing workshops, words, not music. As much as I can because I love words and I was in one with Marie Howe, who’s an amazing poet. She’s just an incredible writer and teacher. And I wrote what would become this song. Often I start pieces, I start compositions with the music, and then the words come. But I’ve always been interested in trying to start with the words and then make music, and I’ve done that a few times. When I started writing the words that would become the song and when I was assessing the songs that I had for this record, I felt like it needed a big song. And, I love the tradition that Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen have of many verses and just a very simple chorus. And I thought about doing that before and I’ve never taken my own challenge. I think my songs cover basically every genre there is. So I figured I’d try to make that kind of song out of that piece of writing. It’s basically done in two days. It was really, it was like one of those songs that you had been preparing your whole life to make. And then when you decided on it, it just all came together. Like a whirlwind. Which is really fun and almost scary, ’cause you can work on a song for a really long time and you have to wait often for the right bridge to come. Or even just one word to fill itself in for the song to get finished. And this song was just waiting to be written.
Monte Dube: To me it doesn’t sound scary in this context, it sounds like you, you heard you channeled some still small voice that came out of you. Can I talk about your song Back Again?
Joan As Police Woman: Yeah.
Monte Dube: So much of your songs here are, I would say heartachingly beautiful. And one line, and I’m conflating ’em. “I want you back again. I can’t hold out any longer.” This song is just a start, a hope. You’ll slip into this melody, which sounded to me a little bit like the alluring sirens trying to bring Odysseus to them.
Joan As Police Woman: It’s funny because that song is actually not about a specific person. But we all have had that feeling. It is a universal feeling of ugh, I made the wrong decision or I did something that I really regret, any of those things where you’re trying to convince someone that it’s just the right idea to get back with them. And usually when you’ve broken up, it’s the right idea. It’s the right thing. So it’s pretty desperate.
Monte Dube: You’ve said you’ve lived many lives, so, you’ve had many relationships. Good and bad and everything in between. I’m gonna ask you if you are hopeful, but I’m not gonna use that word. I’m wondering if you’re optimistic, both in terms of where you are in your life now. Obviously the life of our country and planet. How do you keep your optimism in addition to creating music and having beloved relationships?
Joan As Police Woman: I first remember that I don’t know what’s gonna happen. And I believe in humanity, even when humanity feels desolate or without hope, without clarity. But you can see from history incredible growth when it didn’t look possible. There’s just so much we don’t understand about everything. It’s a tiny example in the massive destruction of our planet, our home. But, you read about these crazy black mushrooms that are eating the radioactivity, and not all is lost. And before everything is lost, there are so many channels to regrowth. I believe I can say that from my own life when I felt like this feeling will never change. I will never get over this. I will never be able to get past this, et cetera. And then you do, it takes time and it takes staying out of one’s own head. It’s very important to stay close to the people who support you and love you and who you love and support. And also just like doing service. I’m really tired right now. Who cares? I’m at the best festival in the world. I get to play. I just hung out with some of my favorite people way too late. But I get to play music tomorrow and I get to see an enormous amount of incredible music and art today. So much perspective.
Monte Dube: Joan, thank you for ending our time together on an optimistic note and check out Joan’s new album, Lemon, Limes and Orchids. Take care.
