The Church of Joan Wasser

To get to Club B-10 in the icy season, you first walk past trees that grow upside down, their winterbone branches eerily illumined as they reach past their roots toward the starry sky. Then you cross a snowy courtyard to the 19th-century warehouse in North Adams that is the home of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Before a polite museum crowd seated at cafe tables and on mismatched couches, Joan Wasser stands with her old Guild archtop, eyes lowered in the direction of her fingers, as they crab their way up and down the neck of the guitar. Her skin porcelain pale in the spotlight, she is beautiful, even in the rock 'n' roll uniform of black leather pants and a sleeveless black T-shirt - bare arms delicately muscled beneath fair skin, her once platinum-blond hair newly dyed blue-black. She leans in to the mike to sing her first honeyed notes, and her whole body seems to contract in the direction of her voice - her face tilted skyward, back arched in a Ccurve, knees pressed together. She's in her own world now, her eyes closed, her voice visceral and spare against the lush intricacy of her music. "And if you feel like you might want to share this with me," she sings, "then I beckon you to me."

Ten years ago, this voice didn't exist. A classically trained violinist, Wasser, 34, has been a working musician since her college days at Boston University, when she experienced her first big success as a member of the '90s art-rock darlings the Dambuilders. Back then, she played her five-stringed violin like a second lead guitar. But for most of her career, she has made her living as a supporting artist - as a member of other people's bands and as a session musician for such rock VIPs as Nick Cave, Lou Reed, and Sheryl Crow. She drew attention even as a supporting player, with her wild dreadlocks and space-age vinyl dresses, but she was always the charismatic girl in the background - an enigma with a glitter-covered violin. She rarely sang.

But in 2002, she began to perform and record as Joan as Police Woman, a solo project for which she writes music and lyrics, plays guitar, violin, and Wurlitzer - and sings. At a time when listeners are looking for relief from mainstream music's boastful cynicism and overprocessed artifice, Wasser has beguiled audiences with songs that blend compositional artistry with an unabashedly intimate lyricism - a raw honesty that she considers essential to her work.

In the last year, her solo career has taken off. Gutsy torch songs like "Stagger Into the Light" and "How Come You're So Solid Gold?" began to catch critics' attention: Print reviews have called her "one of the indie world's most dynamic and generous musicians" and her music "too beautiful to go unappreciated." She released her first record, the five-song album Joan as Police Woman, and toured the United States and Britain with alt-troubadours Rufus Wainwright and Joseph Arthur. Now she's got two new projects on the horizon, a full-length album, tentatively titled Show Me the Life, and a new album.

The buzz around her music is growing louder, and still she pays the bills by playing, singing, and arranging music for other people. Though she cares most about her solo project, she performs as Joan as Police Woman only a few times a month, mostly at small hipster clubs and bars in Boston and New York. But she's making disciples with every show, and for now, at least, she is content to enjoy her time in that space, as she says, "in between the underground and the overground, where you're still able to be an artist."

To spend time with Wasser is to share in her fascination with the details of quotidian life and especially her enchantment with the individuals she encounters every day, whether on the Manhattan subway or on tour in middle America - the new waitress nervously serving her coffee at a down-and-out Thai restaurant in Cleveland, a homeless man she meets on tour in a Nashville parking lot. Onstage, between songs, she talks with the audience the same way she talks to her friends, just saying whatever she's thinking, making off-color jokes, chatting about her songs or her fondness for Whitney Houston or the tricky zipper on her leather jeans.

When then she sits down at the Wurlitzer and plays the first crystalline notes of "My Gurl," an elegiac torch song she composed shortly after the death of her lover, the singer Jeff Buckley, in 1997, the disconnect is striking. But Wasser shrugs off the apparent contradiction.

"I think the funnier you are, the sadder you've felt," she says, "because it's sometimes really dire. I mean, what is more sorrowful than mortal life? You can't get sadder than that. And the older you get, the more people dying around you, and dealing with your parents' deaths - you have to make light of it. You have to laugh; it's too much not to. Humor is incredibly important to me, but I don't write humorous songs. So I guess that other part of me comes out in my music."

Her music is hard to put your finger on, hard to pin down in butterfly boxes or file tidily away. It's rock, but it's also jazz, rhythm and blues, soul, pop, punk, and the 20th-century classical that was her first taste of music's possibility. She calls it "American soul music," a term that to her encompasses the whole spectrum of songs that have shaped her life. Mahler and Marley, Nina Simone and Dmitry Shostakovich - to Wasser, it's all just music, the woolly and wondrous sounds of life. "Sometimes I do feel that I write classical pieces as rock songs, because I don't feel like I have boundaries," she says. "I wasn't reared learning Bob Dylan songs that have three or four chords; I grew up loving Shostakovich. So sometimes I find some of the most complicated harmonies to be the most beautiful."

"There's a very defined and sort of complicated artistry that goes into her songwriting, but it's mixed up with this very soulful, emotional truth," says the singer-songwriter Antony, who has performed with Wasser for years in his band Antony and the Johnsons. "It's this combination of soulful ideas and really sophisticated musical forms - sort of avant-garde forms - that don't necessarily heed conventions of pop-song writing. She follows her whimsy and her passion through her melody, and she follows a fiercely individual muse when she's writing her songs. But they always relay something that you can feel coming straight from the heart of her."

Music has been a vital part of Wasser's life since she was a child: She took dance lessons at 4 and picked up a violin at 8. As a teenager in Norwalk, Connecticut, she sold Jolt Cola at the Anthrax, a local punk club, where she saw such bands as Black Flag, Bad Brains, Sonic Youth, and The Fall. During the same years, she performed as a violinist with local youth symphonies, so throughout high school she was the orchestra kid with the mohawk.

As a high school freshman, she played Mahler's second symphony under Boston Philharmonic conductor Benjamin Zander. It changed her. "I had never played or heard anything like Mahler, and I was like, `Whoa, this is it - I want to do this forever,' '' she recalls. "When you start playing music, you enter another world, another realm of existence, and that's what I felt when I played the Mahler thing. It was like church: I was there with all these people, with 100 people in the orchestra, and we all made this amazing huge thing happen together. And I was just like, `Oh, my God, this is it.'" She pauses, then adds, "So now I'm the leader of my own church," and laughs raucously.

But getting there hasn't been easy.

Wasser was 18 when she realized that her classical training didn't have to limit the music she played. She arrived in Boston in 1988 to study violin, attracted to BU as a liberal-arts school with a fine-music program - and in a city big enough to satisfy her craving for sounds of all kinds.

She met Mary Timony - now an indie luminary in her own right - at BU's freshman music orientation, and the two young women quickly bonded over their shared passion for punk. A guitarist as well as a viola player, Timony as a high school student had played in the Washington, D.C., punk band Autoclave, writing her own songs and making a place for herself in the boys club of rock 'n' roll. Soon, Wasser was improvising music alongside Timony and, for the first time, comprehended that she could use her violin to play rock. "I thought I was going to do classical music," Wasser says. "I loved, I loved, I loved listening to rock, but it didn't make sense in terms of playing the violin. . . . But then Mary and I started playing together, and that's how it all started."

Within the year, Wasser was performing informally with BU and Berklee College musicians, and it was during a show with the BU band the Lotus Eaters at T. T. the Bear's Place in Cambridge that Dambuilders singer/bassist Dave Derby first saw Wasser onstage. She won him over immediately. "When I watched her play," he says, "I realized that this is really the way the band always should have been."

She recorded her first album with the Dambuilders in 1991, the year Nirvana's Nevermind blasted alternative rock into America's consciousness. The band enjoyed modest success for much of the '90s, recording three albums with Warner/Elektra/Atlantic's East West label and touring with Top 40 groups like Better Than Ezra and Third Eye Blind.

The Dambuilders put Wasser on the map as a violin player who exploded the limits of the instrument. But she was still in a supporting role. For years, she had wanted to sing and write her own songs, but playing in other people's bands had never really given her the opportunity. Although as a kid she'd sung and danced on community stages and had never lost her love of performing, in the self-conscious mire of adolescence, she had quit singing. Her violin became her voice.

Wasser met Jeff Buckley while on tour in the summer of 1994, and they soon fell in love. Following the release of his iconic debut album, Grace, that year, Buckley's star was on the rise. Fans adored his lovely, troubled ballads; critics were calling him one of the most promising voices of his generation. Wasser considered him the partner she'd spend her life with. Though they lived in different cities for much of their relationship, the two musicians always found time to be together. Their careers frequently intersected as well, when the Dambuilders shared a bill with Buckley and his band or Buckley joined Wasser in her other projects.

Then, in 1997, shortly before the Dambuilders dissolved, Buckley drowned in a tributary of the Mississippi River. He was 30. "It seems like that was another life," Wasser says, "and when that ended, I started a new life, started over. It was like I was birthed, thrown into the freezing water. I felt that I had to start from an infant, really unprotected. And I had an adolescence in there that I'm out of now. And now I feel like I'm actually coming into my own. In the last year, I've matured into my new life."

If Buckley is not a force in her work - it's hard to say, because it's one of the few topics too private for her to speak openly about - the change that his death sparked in her life is everywhere in her music; even her most haunting songs are brushed with hope. "I realized that you have to make every second like your last," she says. "And that's not morbid, that's just reality. I had been wanting to sing and learn how to write songs myself. And after it happened, I was definitely like, `There's no time for waiting, Joan.'"

She joined with Buckley's band to play for his memorial service - "We started playing together and also grieving together," she says - and they continued to perform together as Black Beetle. The band never put out an album, but as Wasser began to have more of a hand in writing songs and then performing them - singing them - onstage, she discovered a voice that had lain dormant. "The voice as an instrument, as your own instrument, is so exciting and so terrifying," she says. "When you're playing an instrument, the music is not coming out of your physical body. With singing, you got what you got. It's like facing all your fears."

She wrote her first song shortly after Buckley's death. She was in Toronto shooting a video for the Dambuilders' "Burn This Bridge," and in the empty minutes while the crew was setting lights and framing shots, she sat on the set in her makeup and crazy hair and played guitar. For the shoot, the production team had provided the band with cool-looking vintage instruments that didn't work. Wasser played anyway.

"All the pegs on the guitar were broken, so I tuned it in this crazy way, just so it would stay, so it made this nutty open chord," she says. "I remember sitting there with this guitar that's not tuned right, and I think I wrote my first song that day, `My Gurl.'"

Eventually she transposed the song to the piano, and the resulting sound - delicate, harmonically complex, and fiercely honest - remains the signature piece that unifies her work. She had found her voice.

Wasser played her first solo show in 1999. Audiences were sparse at first, and for years she lived from paycheck to paycheck, taking on gigs to cover the next month's rent, driven only by faith and an unshakable love of performing. "There's just something about live music that makes me crazy and always has," she says. "Playing music feels like worshipping, somehow. Listening feels like you're lucky enough to be there while other people gather the gods for themselves."

When she performs, she invites audiences into that holy space, and they respond; over the years, she has built a devoted following. With the release of last year's album and tours in this country and abroad, she rapidly found herself on the cusp of a breakthrough. By the end of last year, she was playing to full houses at New York venues like Joe's Pub, Tonic, and Fez.

As her career has blossomed, her music has continued to evolve. Her newest songs are sparer than those on the Joan as Police Woman album, forgoing some of the labyrinthine depth of her song craft for a clarity as simple and as complicated as life. In November, she wrote the first song directly addressed to Buckley; it centers on an epiphany: "I owe my life, I know, I owe it life."

"It's funny how your truths come out in songs, far more than you could ever get to them just by thinking," she says. "Now I feel like I'm revealing even more, because I'm saying what I have to say in a more straightforward manner. I'm more comfortable with who I am. I'm also less afraid, and the less afraid I get, the less veiled things have to be."

The music comes first, when Wasser composes, some melody or nascent groove stirring the stagnant air of the F train as it rumbles into Manhattan. With her violin stowed on the floor between her feet as she heads to her next gig, she might close her eyes and let the sound come, to begin that alchemical shift of emotion and memory into song, into music.

The words will come later, in the studio or in the busy Brooklyn apartment Wasser has called home since she moved from Boston eight years ago. There the song will begin to take shape, as she assembles the intricate compositions that have drawn so many people to her music.

Then, one midwinter night, she'll stand on the stage with her guitar, in that place where trees grow upside down and tigers hang suspended from the ceiling. And she will sing - her throaty, velvety alto giving way to a celestial lullaby, exploring the whole wild range of the human voice, melodic oohs and ohs, thuggish grunts and seductive coos, confiding whispers and animal cries. Then she'll crack a salty joke and laugh that lioness laugh.

"I have laid down such a strong sense of who I am as a musician," she observes after the show, "that people are always interested when they hear that I am now singing and writing songs. A lot of people say, `Wow. Why have you been hiding that voice?' when really I haven't. It forced itself out. I stood by and watched."

Tricia Brick writes for Bostonia, the alumni magazine of Boston University. Her e-mail address is pbrick@bu.edu.