‘Are we legends yet?’: Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson reflect on 50 years of music and sisterhood

LOS ANGELES — Half a century after the release of 1975’s “Dreamboat Annie,” Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart are on the road. The tour wasn’t necessarily designed to mark the 50th anniversary of the band’s debut album: Heart started playing concerts again in 2023 — the Wilsons’ first gigs together since before the pandemic — only to call off dates last July when Ann announced that she’d been diagnosed with cancer.

Yet the rescheduled road show offers as good a reason as any to consider Heart’s journey over the last five decades from the clubs of the Pacific Northwest to heavy rotation on MTV to an affectionate embrace by rock’s next generation. (Don’t forget that Ann and Nancy appeared on the soundtrack of 1992’s “Singles” alongside Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains.)

Ahead of opening night, the sisters — whose relationship was tested in 2016 when Ann’s husband, Dean Wetter, assaulted Nancy’s twin teenage sons backstage at a show in Washington — gathered recently on Zoom for a chat. Ann, 74, was at her home in Nashville, Tenn., and Nancy, 70, at her home in Northern California.

How you feeling at the moment, Ann?

Ann: I’m feeling like myself again. I got done with a course of chemotherapy a few months ago — that was brutal. But I’m clear.

Did the brutality of chemo come as a shock?

Ann: I mean, they’re putting poison into you. What do you expect?

What’s it been like to get the show back on its feet after a lengthy break?

Nancy: We need plenty of rehearsing. Unlike a lot of entertainment, we do a 100 percent skin-in-the-game live rock show. That requires a lot of warmup and a lot of physical training to have flexibility and strength underneath you.

You’re saying Heart doesn’t use pre-recorded tracks. Is that a matter of ethics in your view?

Nancy: I don’t have a big, fat opinion about people who use playback — everybody kind of uses it these days — but I think what’s been missing in music is the authentic, real thing. There’s a few old, dogged bands like Heart that are still out there doing it the old-fashioned way, which is actually singing and actually playing. When we were out last time, I made a great big blooper on the guitar while I was doing my famous intro to “Crazy on You” — totally train-wrecked it. But everybody in the audience was like, “Wow, how cool is a mistake?” It wasn’t a perfect playback of something that’s not really happening, and I got congratulated for making a human error on a live stage.

You guys did an acoustic performance on Kelly Clarkson’s TV show last year where the vocals were super dialed-in. This is kind of dark to consider —

Ann: Let’s get dark for a minute.

If you lost the ability to sing at that level, would you feel you had to quit?

Nancy: I don’t know what we’d do. Bring in a small ensemble of singers to help us get through the more challenging vocal spots? It’s pretty challenging music to sing and play. It’s more than four chords.

You didn’t make it easy on yourselves.

Nancy: There’s times we curse ourselves for writing music that was purposefully complex. We were trying to show off when we were in our 20s, and now we have to live up to it.

Beyond your commitment to the music, last year’s tour seemed like a way for the two of you to reconnect after a period of turmoil.

Nancy: Being onstage with each other, no matter what grief or loss or challenge we’re going through emotionally as sisters — it’s a healing process.

Ann: When you get a cut or a scrape, it doesn’t just heal overnight. It takes maybe a couple of weeks to come back to its new form. I think every time we go onstage together, we get a little bit farther back to the inside jokes and the language we developed through our childhoods. We came up together side by side — learned how to play guitar together and how to sing by sharing a bedroom in our parents’ house and just doing nothing but that all day long. It’s a lot to come back to.

Could that work of reconciliation continue after the tour was interrupted?

Ann: The stage is where most of the healing takes place. It’s a safe place for us to be.

You both spoke candidly to Rolling Stone about the backstage incident in 2016. A lot of celebrities would avoid talking about it.

Ann: I think that people who love Heart and care about Nancy and I deserve the truth.

Nancy: We didn’t come from a Hollywood-style upbringing.

When Chris Cornell inducted Heart into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, he said, “Somehow it never occurred to us that Ann and Nancy Wilson were women.” Obviously he meant it in an admiring way. But that quote illustrates a historical tendency to describe Heart’s greatness in masculine terms.

Ann: That’s always been a pretty deep-seated frustration of mine — that being a woman means you’re just trying to replicate what men are doing.

Nancy: Coming into it, people were like, “How do you maintain your femininity and still strut around with a big rock guitar?” Why should doing something really powerful be exclusive to one gender or the other?

Ann: It’s getting better, though. Taylor Swift has opened doors in that she can go out there with her innermost musings about her life, and people love it. They don’t say, “Come on, Taylor — be more of a badass.” Nobody’s really done that since Joni Mitchell.

Rock Hall aside, do you think Heart has gotten its due?

Ann: I don’t. We’ve just always felt like we’re the last to be considered — never been asked to be on “SNL,” all that kind of stuff. There’s some “No, these guys aren’t hip enough” role that’s in place, and we’ve never understood what that is.

Nancy: In the ’90s, we kind of started to say, “Are we legends yet?” We’d been around for years, from the ’70s through the successful ’80s albums — the videos and the big hair and the kabuki of it all — into the ’90s when it was cool to be with the grunge players that we loved. Then we put out an album (“Desire Walks On”) that kind of stiffed. We were like, “S—, we’re not legends yet.”

Given your background as songwriters, did you have mixed feelings when “These Dreams” and “Alone” — songs you didn’t write — became huge hits in the ‘80s?

Ann: Only because we were still writing then and most of our songs were looked at with this quirky expression — like, “Where are you gonna get this played?”

Nancy: In the case of “Alone” and “These Dreams,” we couldn’t deny how great those songs were. “Alone” is a song you could’ve heard in World War I — in a black-and-white film or in a cabaret somewhere in Europe. “These Dreams” is similar. It’s a complex, romantic, ethereal song that some great singer in any era could’ve made beautiful. But there were other songs from the L.A. songwriter stable — star-maker-machinery songs — that we kind of resented.

What’s an example?

Nancy: “Who Will You Run To.” What irked us about those songs is the victim thing — [whines] “Why don’t you call me back?” — instead of somebody going, “How do I get you alone?,” which is proactive, you know?

Ann: That song was a real low point in our nightly set list. There was just no substance to it that we could find. We had a jokey name for it, which was “Where You Gonna Park Your Butt At”?

Nancy: It was a little too high school. Even one of our own songs, “ Magic Man,” there was a time when Ann didn’t want to sing it.

Ann: I was 24 when “Magic Man” was written. That was my first love, and so I’d do anything — I’d go home and wash the sheets by hand and hang them outside to dry. It was romantic, right? Later in our career, in the ’80s and ’90s, I couldn’t relate to that 24-year-old anymore. I found it hard to get up there live and put that song across with any kind of force.

How about now?

Ann: Now I can do it because I’ve got enough distance from it.

Nancy, why did you sing lead on “These Dreams”?

Nancy: I’m a guitar player, but I love singing — I love trying to sing. I heard that song while we were auditioning demos with our producer Ron Nevison. A lot of them really sucked, but at the end Ron said, “This is never gonna be a good Heart song, but it’s really interesting and it’s got lyrics by Bernie Taupin.” He put on “These Dreams,” and I knew immediately I could do it because it was so different from a Heart song. The management company at the time said, “No f—ing way,” but I pushed really hard and finally got a chance to do it. Everybody was like, “Wait a minute — that really worked.” They said, “Remind us never to say no to you again.” I guess I was right, because that was our first No. 1 song.

The story goes that Taupin and his co-writer, Martin Page, first offered “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’s got that fairy-tale witchiness that Stevie has.

What’s a great power ballad that you wish Heart had gotten?

Ann: Donna Summer’s “The Woman in Me,” which we actually covered. “The Living Years” (by Mike + the Mechanics), that was another one.

Nancy: I was so mad that we didn’t do Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One.” I wanted to be the singer on that song so bad.

After the glossy big-hair moment, Heart was one of the relatively few bands from that era to survive into the alt-rock ‘90s.

Ann: It was like some kind of purge.

Nancy: We thought everyone was gonna hate us because they were pushing back against the hair bands and the L.A. scene. We weren’t from L.A., thank God, and at the time it was cool to be from Seattle. We were saved by the skin of our teeth.

Ann: In the ’80s, we felt comfortable for maybe the first and second of those albums. After that, the constant repetition of clothes and video-making and too many shows — it’s really not good for a person’s emotional house of cards. The artifice had reached a point of being inauthentic. We had to just strip back all the bulls— and get real.