Joan Kellogg

Wildly acclaimed Brooklyn songwriter Joan As Police Woman returns with her new album Cover Two. This is Joan’s second album re-working songs by other artists and again, Joan makes some very interesting choices.

Joan is a 3 times Grammy Nominated Singer / Songwriter. Consequences, Joan Armatrading’s new album, is one of her most intimate and direct albums yet and one that wears its conscience and its heart on its sleeve. Released via BMG, and her 22nd studio album to date, it ably illustrates the fact that Joan Armatrading never likes to repeat herself. It is a very different follow up to 2018’s Top 30 hit album Not Too Far Away.

Joan Wasser's first Joan as Police Woman album, Real Life, mourned the loss of her lover, Jeff Buckley, while her second, To Survive, mourned the loss of her mother. The Deep Field, however, finds her alone but not lonely, still searching for something and finding beauty and even happiness, if not answers. Wasser reunited with producer Bryce Goggin for this set of songs, but the guests that popped up on her previous albums are notably absent, as is much of the sadness that made Real Life and To Survive as wrenching as they were compelling. Not that The Deep Field is entirely clear sailing: on “Nervous,” she’s shaken precisely because things are going so well with a new love, while on “Run for Love,” she cautions, “I don’t wanna talk on the future with you” even as she revels in togetherness. Here, her highs are as stratospheric as her lows were deep before; “The Action Man” starts as a spin around the dancefloor and ends with Wasser losing track of time and space. These unique twists she puts on happiness keep the album fresh, even when its second half ventures into the smoothest musical territory Wasser has yet explored.

Joan Osborne set the world on fire for a few minutes back in the '90s with her reading of Eric Bazilian's "One of Us," a single that dominated the charts for the better part of a year and continues to get radio play. The album, Relish, sold into the millions, making everybody and her brother (especially the folks at her label Interscope) think she was going to be a superstar. It didn't work out that way. Despite being one of the greatest R&B and soul singers around (before she played in the big leagues she issued a few independent recordings on her own Womanly Hips label that offer stellar proof of this), she got her rep as a pop singer; worse yet, as part of the '90s wave of female acts who dominated the charts for a little while and was a part of the first Lilith Fair, while singing pop songs at half power no less. She recorded one more album for Interscope (which is owned by Universal).