Half a century after the launch of “Dreamboat Annie” of 1975, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart will be scheduled to leave Friday night in Las Vegas. The tour, which will stop at Crypto.com Arena in downtown Los Angeles on Monday, was not necessarily designed to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the band's debut album: Heart began playing concerts again in 2023, the first concerts of the Wilson since before the pandemic, only to cancel the dates last July when Ann announced that he was diagnosed with him.
However, the reprogrammed road show offers a reason as good as anyone to consider Heart's trip in the last five decades from the clubs of the Northwest of the Pacific to a strong rotation in MTV to a affectionate hug for the next generation of rock. (Do not forget that Ann and Nancy appeared in the “Singles” soundtrack of 1992 with Pearl Jam and Alice In Chains).
Before the opening night, the sisters, whose relationship was tested in 2016 when Ann's husband, Dean Wetter, assaulted Nancy's twin children in a show in the state of Washington, recently met in Zoom to talk. Ann, 74, was at home in Nashville and Nancy, 70, at home in northern California.
How do you feel at this time, Ann?
Ann: I feel like me again. A few months ago I ended with a chemotherapy course, that was brutal. But I'm clear.
Was the brutality of chemotherapy a shock?
Ann: I mean, they are making you poison. What do you expect?
How has it been to recover the show after a long break?
Nancy: We need many essays. Unlike much entertainment, we make a 100% skin live rock show in the game. That requires a lot of warming and a lot of physical training to have flexibility and strength under you.
You are saying that Heart does not use pre -registered clues. Is that a matter of ethics in your opinion?
Nancy: I do not have a big and fat opinion about the people who use reproduction, everyone uses it these days, but I think what is missing in music is something authentic and real. There are some old and stubborn bands like Heart that are still out there, which does it to the old one, which is actually singing and playing. When we left the last time, I made a great blooper on the guitar while making my famous introduction to “Crazy on You”, which sent it by train. But all at the audience said: “Wow, how great is a mistake?” It was not a perfect reproduction of something that is not really happening, and they congratulated me for making a human error in a live stage.
You made a acoustic performance In Kelly Clarkson's television program last year, where the voices were super marked. This is a bit dark to consider –
Ann: We are going to get dark for a minute.
If you lost the ability to sing at that level, would you feel that you had to quit smoking?
Nancy: I don't know what we would do. Bring a small set of singers to help us overcome the most challenging vocal places? It is a fairly challenging music to sing and play. They are more than four chords.
They did not make it easy for yourself.
Nancy: There are times that we cursed for writing music that was deliberately complex. We were trying to show off when we were in our 20 years, and now we have to live up to it.
Beyond your commitment to music, last year's tour seemed a way for you to connect again after an agitation period.
Nancy: Being on stage with each other, regardless of what pain or loss or challenge we are passing emotionally as sisters: it is a healing process.
Ann: When you get a cut or scrape, not just heals the night. Maybe they need a couple of weeks to return to their new form. I think that every time we are on stage together, we recover a little further from internal jokes and the language we develop through our childhood. We met one next to each other: we learned to play the guitar together and how to sing sharing a bedroom in our parents' house and simply doing nothing more than all day. It is a lot to return to.
Could that reconciliation work continue after the tour was interrupted?
Ann: The scenario is where most of the healing takes place. It is a safe place for us.
Both He spoke frankly A Rolling Stone about the incident behind the stage in 2016. Many celebrities would avoid talking about it.
Ann: I think people who love their hearts and care about Nancy and I deserve the truth.
Nancy: We did not come from a Hollywood style education.
Ann Wilson, center to the right, and Nancy Wilson act with heart in Pittsburgh in May 2024.
(Criss Cain)
When Chris Cornell induced heart In the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, he said: “Somehow, we never occurred to us that Anncy Wilson were women.” Obviously I said it seriously. But that quotation illustrates a historical tendency to describe the greatness of the heart in male terms.
Ann: That has always been a fairly deep frustration of mine, that being a woman means that you are just trying to replicate what men are doing.
Nancy: Upon entering, people said: “How do you keep your femininity and still pee with a large rock guitar?” Why do something really powerful to be exclusive to one genre or another?
Ann: However, it is improving. Taylor Swift has opened doors in the sense that he can go out with his most interior reflections on his life, people love him. They don't say: “Come on, Taylor, be more rude.” Nobody has really done that from Joni Mitchell.
Apart from Rock Hall, do you think Heart has obtained?
Ann: No. We always feel that we are the last to be considered, they have never been asked to be in “SNL”, all that kind of thing. There is a role of “no, these guys are not enough hips” that is in their place, and we have never understood what that is.
Nancy: In the 90s, we begin to say: “Are we already legends?” We had existed for years, from the 70s to the successful albums of the 80s, the videos and the great hair and the Kabuki of everything, until the 90s when it was great to be with the grunge players we love. Then we get an album [“Desire Walks On”] That type of rigid. We think: “S …, we are not yet legends.”
Given his background as composers, did you have feelings found when “these dreams” and “only”, songs you did not write, became great hits in the 80s?
Ann: Just because we were still writing then and most of our songs were observed with this extravagant expression, such as, “where are you going to play this?”
Nancy: In the case of “Alone” and “these Dreams”, we could not deny how great those songs were. “Alone” is a song that you could have heard in World War I, in a black and white movie or in a cabaret somewhere in Europe. “These dreams” are similar. It is a complex, romantic and ethereal song that some great singer at any time could have been beautiful. But there were other songs by Los Angeles's composer, the stable, the songs of Estrella Machinery, which we resent.
What is an example?
Nancy: “Who are you running”? What bothered us about these songs is the victim – [whines] “Why don't you return me back?” – Instead that someone goes, “How do I get you?”, What is proactive, do you know?
Ann: That song was a real low point on our nightlife. There was simply no substance that we could find. We had a jewel name, what was “where will you park”?
Nancy: It was a bit of high school. Even one of our own songs, “Magic Man”, there was a time when Ann didn't want to sing it.
Ann: He was 24 years old when “Magic Man” was written. That was my first love, and I would do anything: I would go home and wash the sheets by hand and hang them outside to dry. He was romantic, right? Later in our career, in the 80s and 90s, I could no longer relate to that 24 -year -old. It was difficult for me to get there live and put that song with any kind of strength.
How about now?
Ann: Now I can do it because I have enough distance from him.
Nancy, why did you sing leadership in “these Dreams”?
Nancy: I am a guitarist, but I love singing, I love trying to sing. I listened to that song while we audicized demonstrations with our producer Ron Nevison. Many of them really stamping, but in the end Ron said: “This will never be a good heart song, but it is really interesting and has lyrics of Bernie Taupin.” He put “these dreams”, and I immediately knew that he could do it because he was very different from a song from the heart. The management company at that time said: “No F – Fray Way”, but I press very strong and finally I had the opportunity to do so. Everyone said: “Wait a minute, that really worked.” They said: “Remind us that we never tell you not again.” I guess he was right, because that was our first song number 1.
What was your conclusion about that?
Nancy: That the boys with costumes, their ears are painted.
History tells that Taupin and his co -writer, Martin Page, offered for the first time “these dreams” to Stevie Nicks. Did you know that when you cut it?
Nancy: No, Bernie told me later. But I can see why they did it: it has that fairy tale witch that Stevie has.
What is a great ballad of power that would you desire that Heart has received?
Ann: “The woman in me” by Donna Summer, that we really cover. “The years of life” [by Mike + the Mechanics]That was another.
Nancy: I was so angry that we did not “continue” from Shania Twain. I wanted to be the singer of that song so bad.
After the brilliant moment of big hair, Heart was one of the relatively few bands of that time to survive the 90s of the alternative rock.
Ann: It was like a kind of purge.
Nancy: We thought they would all hate us because they were pushing against the hair bands and the Los Angeles scene. We were not from Los Angeles, thank God, and at that moment it was great to be from Seattle. We were saved by the skin of our teeth.
Ann: In the 80s, we feel comfortable for maybe the first and second of those albums. After that, the constant repetition of clothes and the creation of videos and too many programs: it is really not good for the emotion of a person of a person. I think the artifice had reached a point of being authentic. We had to take off all the bulls and make us real.
Nancy: We removed the corsets and put on the combat boots. It was a great moment in music. I remember the first time I heard “it smells like a teenage spirit.” He was like, someone is playing guitars again!
