What Was It Like

Album: Damned Devotion (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • Joan Wasser, AKA Joan as Police Woman, was adopted at birth by her parents, Pauline and Dick. Her research chemist adoptive father was one of the kindest men she's ever known, and here she pays tribute to his calm and generous spirit.

    You said, I could never see what passing judgment
    On anybody else would ever do for me


    Wasser told Uncut magazine: "My father had passed a couple of years before, and I got a quote of his in there, in the chorus, because I wanted to remember it - 'I could never see what passing judgment. On anybody else would ever do for me.' That song is 100 percent about him and how gentle he was as a person."
  • Wasser's crooning of her devotion to a parental figure ties in with Damned Devotion's theme of devoting herself to things obsessively. She told Uncut the record is "about the creative process and also that idea of devotion in general, the fact that when your devoted to something all of your peripheral vision disappears."

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