Joan As Police Woman: The Deep Field

Goodbye heartache, hello fun — and the rich, warm vibes of '70s soul.

Beauty comes in many guises. On 2006's Real Life, Joan Wasser's first album as Joan As Police Woman, it arrived as a fractured, fragile thing, dispensed via pensive piano pieces and a voice that spoke of a life spent on the edge of some vertiginous emotional precipice. Already 36, Wasser was one of those intriguing NYC art-music propositions: classically trained, she was a protegee of Rufus Wainwright and Antony Hegarty who had collaborated with Lou Reed and had also been Jeff Buckley's lover at the time of his death in 1997. Buckley wrote the slinky 'Everybody Here Wants You' as a hymn to Wasser's magnetism, and listening to Real Life it wasn't hard to understand why.