INTERVIEW: Joan As Police Woman releases tenth studio album 'Lemons, Limes and Orchids'
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Paola Kudacki
Published: 20 September 2024
Joan As Police Woman, real name Joan Wasser, is a creative tour de force. Beginning her music career studying classical music, she played in punk and rock bands before moving into a more pop oriented sound when she launched her solo career in 2006.
During her career she has collaborated with some of music’s biggest names including Jeff Buckley, Anthony & the Johnsons (Anohni) and Rufus Wainwright and has been called ‘one of the 21st century’s best musicians.’
Today she releases her tenth studio album Lemons, Limes and Orchids, her first album after since her 2021 collaboration with Tony Allen and Dave Okumu The Solution Is Restless, and her first solo album of new music since 2018.
The 12 tracks are an exploration of love and loss, with intimate lyrics that are like reading pages from Wasser’s diary. Sonically it refuses to stay in any particular lane - part of Wasser’s genius - with soul tracks with classical leanings comfortably sitting next to pop dripping with synths. It is, she says, an album that truly represents her. “I was ready to make an album that truly featured my voice,” she says. “The basics were recorded like they used to be - with me singing live along with the band. My good friend told me this is the sexiest album I’ve ever made. Honestly, I think she’s right."
That sexiness comes to the forefront right from the very beginning, with the first bars of opening track ‘The Dream’ featuring a repeated, sensual pant. It moves into a dreamy, mellow electronic-pop-house sound with shuffling beats and a synth sliding in in the final minute of the song.
‘Back Again’ is a delicious collision of soul and funk that starts off as pared back soul before the elements of funk gradually creep in. Featuring Grammy Award winner Meshell Ndegeocello on bass, the song is a plea to a former romantic partner to reignite their relationship: ‘Don’t wanna be saying this / But how can I say it other than / I want you, I want you back again.’
‘With Hope In My Breath’ is a soaring, rock piano-guitar ballad, while ‘Remember The Voice’ is a lowkey synthpop track with a classic 1980s feel with lyrics that speak of how love brought peace to a previously troubled life: “Yeah I was a mess / On the street in my nightdress…Love looks like a word so false it’s true / But I found it, I found it in you.”
Title track ‘Lemons, Limes And Orchids’, at an epic six and a half minutes running time, is a gorgeously ethereal track with little more than Wasser’s voice and a discordant guitar and blurry electronic beats in the background. With lyrics that are a stream of consciousness, the song is a story of a woman wandering the streets and reflecting on the things she sees, pivotal moments in her life and a melancholic quest to find herself, which possibly, depending on how you interpret the lyrics, ends in tragedy.
Wasser leans into smoky soul on ‘Tribute To Holding On’ and ‘Safe To Say’, before ending the album on the pure piano ballad of ‘Help Is On Its Way’. It has a live feel and showcases Wasser’s beautiful vocals as she sings of diving head first into love. ‘Well here goes nothing / I am your lover / I’ll say it again / You are my lover,’ before throwing it all into doubt with the final lyric ‘Just joking.’
Lemons, Limes and Orchids is a sparkling album that both thrills, surprises and entrances. Wasser is a consummate musician that can authentically take you through a myriad of genres while still maintaining a through line and ensuring you remain immersed in the world she has created. One of pop’s most intriguing figures, Joan As Police Woman has delivered yet again and we recently spoke to her about the creation of the album.
Joan, very lovely to speak to you. Lemons, Limes and Orchids is such a beautiful album. It feels like it’s a very comfortable place where a lot’s going on sonically, but you deliver it almost in a very peaceful, reflective state.
Yeah, you said it! This album felt very comfortable to make. Thankfully I’m comfortable after ten albums.
Title track, ‘Lemon Limes and Orchids’ is a gorgeous track, with a young woman on the road and existential thoughts on humanity. Why did you decide to make this the title track?
I wrote the words to this a couple of years ago. When I say the words “lemons, limes and orchids”, specific colours come into my mind – very gorgeous, bright, vibrant colours. And the lyric that it comes from is “peels of lemons, limes and orchids, security tags entangled in a great weave of humanity”. I’m walking around and I’m looking at the rubbish on the ground, and it turns out that a lot of things people throw out are very beautiful. When you listen to the song, you understand that I’m actually describing what I’m seeing on the street. It’s a way of thinking about something in different ways.
You’ve said that the album is the sexiest one you’ve made, and I think that’s brilliant.
I didn’t say that, my friend said that!
Well, it is a sexy album! There’s the sensuality that comes with confidence and knowing what you’re doing.
Yeah, I feel like that’s a theme in my albums. But with this one, I was falling in love while I was writing it, so I feel there’s a lot of that in there, and you can’t really fake that. So I’m glad I got it into the songs.
Your career started with you playing violin with different people and eclectic groups, until one day you decided the violin just wasn’t enough. Were you always writing songs, and was there always a voice in there just aching to get out?
No. I was never interested in singing or writing songs. I left that to the singers and the songwriters. That’s how I felt. I wanted to pick up where John Cale left off and revitalise the violin as a cool thing, rather than the top-line, cutesy instrument it is in pop. I never would have ever guessed that I would be singing and writing songs. But it was how I needed to proceed to sort of stay alive and stay content.
Was that something to do with the fact that songwriting is often very raw, it’s very exposing? It’s one thing to play a melody but it’s another thing to be like “Here’s all the things I think about.”
Sure, it just never occurred to me. It was not like I thought I couldn’t do it, it was just something I didn’t want to do. I love the violin, and that really kept me busy, physically and mentally and creatively, for a long time, until I just needed something else. The emotions were too much, and I needed to find another way to release them. It had to be musically, because that’s how I express myself, so I started singing. I wasn’t excited about having to start singing, honestly, but I had to listen to the direction from inside that tells me what to do, without my permission necessarily.
Your music has always been such a mix. There’s some soul, some fun guitars, some pop and then we’re straight back into classical. Has a lot of that come from working with so many communities, so many bands?
I really enjoy listening to a lot of different kinds of music, and have been interested in all kinds of music throughout my life. I studied classical music, but I was going to punk-rock shows when I was a kid, and also grew up with Motown on the radio. Genre never really made sense to me. I think it’s really constricting. I understand human beings really need to put things in boxes – it’s part of the way our brains are set up. But in terms of creativity, I’m not sure it really helps anyone. So I don’t really think about it; the music that I love and have digested over a life comes out in the songs. I do search out different styles of music, to play with people that play in different styles and different places and different cultures, because I’m just so interested in how people other than myself approach music.
How do you feel with where you’re at in your creative journey? What do you think you will explore next?
I never really know, and I try to not think about it that much, because I don’t want to limit myself. I don’t know what I will experience in the next year, you know? Who knows who I’ll meet, and really hit it off with and want to collaborate with. I don’t know. What I do know is I still have so much music in me. So I’m already looking forward to finding out what comes next, because I really feel if I just keep the focus, then it’ll show up.
I think that's a beautiful answer, and I'm glad you said that, because I always feel like a jerk asking that- 'you've just done an album but what are you doing next?' It's so mean!
No, I love that. Of course, you know, I’ve finished the album, it’s out today, it starts today. I'm going to be touring, so I'll be playing these songs a lot, but I don't own them anymore. Everybody else owns them more than me starting today. So, I'm already sort of like, ‘what's happening?’ I'm excited about the future, so we shall see what now comes up.
Lemons, Limes and Orchids is out now via Play It Again Sam. You can buy and stream here.
Follow Joan As Police Woman on Instagram and Facebook
Joan As Police Woman will be touring across the UK and Europe in October and November. More information and tickets here.
