Joan Wasser, who performs as Joan as Police Woman, is celebrating the 20th anniversary of her debut album, "Real Life," this year with a UK-European tour at the end of this year and into the next and a reworked version of the record featuring a lineup of collaborators.

A week ago, she released her latest video, featuring a stripped-down version of her single "Real Life." The release follows five months of session recordings at The Owl Music Parlor in Brooklyn. Those sessions are compiled here in chronological order for your convenience.

I sense how moving it must be for her to revisit songs from 20 years ago. Two decades is enough distance to turn us into different people. This is especially true when you learn that she fell in love at the time, an event that likely triggered her career.

“I wrote this song (Real Life) to romance a man. We met once for 3 minutes and I had decided he was The One. Bear in mind, this is ages ago. Conveniently, we lived 6000 miles apart. We were pen pals. It felt like high romance. He was brilliant actually - perhaps too smart. He was intractable and of course that drove me mad. The song describes the walk to the post office with the love letter - in this case, the cassette recording - and imagines the moment it lands in his hands. I brazenly put his name in the song. Unsurprisingly it didn’t work out between us. But the song did."

To be clear, the studio recordings of her original album remain unchanged. Her re-release for this year is a completely new series of recordings of the same songs with other artists, including Iggy Pop.

Yes, that Iggy Pop!

Both the 2006 and 2026 versions of the Real Life album are available to purchase. As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualified purchases.

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