Ann on Classic Rock K-97 in Edmonton!

New 8 minute interview with Ann done just after the Canadian tour was announced :D

Nancy on 96.3 KKLZ!

Here is the 2nd of the 8 interviews Nancy did on the 28th :D It's a short one but there's some great stuff in it anyhow. And it's always wonderful to hear Nancy laugh :)



Big thank you to Matt who ran the interviews for sending me the info! :D

Kallaway on the Rise Interview with Nancy!

Nancy did 8 radio interviews the morning of the 28th! So far this is the only one I've seen air. Will post the others as I get them :)



Big thank you to Matt who ran the interviews for sending me the info! :D

Nancy Interview with Chop Shop Radio!

Short new Nancy interview taped from the road. Aired the week of Oct. 11th :)

New Ann and Nancy Interview

Here is a great interview Ann and Nancy did with Honolulu DJ Dave Lawrence at HPR from earlier this month. :)

A Conversation with Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson

GREAT interview with Ann and Nancy! Really intelligent questions and just a really enjoyable read. Also looks the Night at Sky Church DVD is set for a Spring release! :)



Ever since their groundbreaking 1976 album Dreamboat Annie debuted, the band Heart--essentially, sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson--have recorded some of the most memorable rockers and ballads to date. Racking up hits like "Magic Man," "Crazy On You," "Barracuda," "Heartless," "Dog and Butterfly," "What About Love," "These Dreams," and many more, Heart has contributed more than a band's fair share to the story of rock. Their latest album, Red Velvet Car--featuring future classics such as "Wheels," "WTF," "Queen City," and the title track--is one of Heart's best releases, and another solid addition to their amazing catalog and legacy.


A Conversation with Heart's Ann and Nancy Wilson

Mike Ragogna: Can you catch us up on your new album, Red Velvet Car?

Nancy Wilson: Well, Red Velvet Car, our new album, just came out at the end of August, and we heard Friday that it was going up on the Billboard charts, so we're really happy. We worked for a couple of years writing songs between the touring and getting other musical stuff together. But working with Ben Mink, our producer on this, was just what the doctor ordered, and people are responding so well. After being around for a while and doing this, our thirteenth studio album, we're really happy to report that it's debuting stronger than any of our other albums ever did.

MR: When you were writing for this record, I guess you overwrote and you still have a few extra songs?

Ann Wilson: Yes, I think we had about sixteen songs, and there are ten on the album.

MR: You guys are so prolific, and you're very good at having an album at least every couple of years. You also have Lovemongers material and all sorts of stuff. How do you keep a balance between all of your projects?

AW: Well, one project helps you evolve into the next. I think that you write some songs, and then you move on when you have things that happen in your life. I think all the songs on Red Velvet Car are autobiographical, and all the songs have come from things that have happened in our lives because we always write from our lives. But this time more than ever, it's just amazing to see these things actually speak.

NW: Yeah.

MR: What's the story behind the title track, "Red Velvet Car"?

NW: "Red Velvet Car" is a story about unconditional love and trust between two people. That can be between me and my sister, Ann, here, or it can be more of a universal statement about something very personal, where you're talking about some people that would do that for each other. There's a wide, wide world of people who would not go rescue anyone, no matter how bad they were. It's more of a statement of what love is about, and the honor, love, and trust that you will give somebody, and a rescue that you will give to someone because you love them no matter how ridiculous it might be, how bad it might get, or how far it is to go.

MR: Now, I have some favorite tracks on this album, and I know you're not supposed to ask an artist to pick a favorite among their children, so to speak, but if I were to ask you which of your songs on this new album you would like to hear right now, what would it be?

NW: Well, I like "There You Go." I think "There You Go" really hits home, and it's a cautionary, finger-shaking tale written to a young girl like a Lindsay Lohan, Britney Spears, or a Snookie, if you will. But it's just saying, "Hey, look out kid. Don't be a fool. It's a jungle out there." That's why it's done in this really swampy style. That song, by the way, was recorded with all the musicians sitting in one room, with all the strings ringing together sympathetically, and there are no real electric instruments on there, they're all wooden.

MR: Nice. You've done a lot, even going back to your first album, with acoustic instruments. People think of you as a good, rocking act, but you're such great acoustic artists, too.

NW: Thank you. That's one thing we've always done, as well as big rock songs--they could rock acoustically. You don't hear acoustic guitar used as a big, fat, rock guitar as much as you do with Heart, usually. I play an aggressive acoustic, as well as a sensitive acoustic guitar, and "There You Go" is a really great example of a big, heavy rock sound with acoustic instruments.

MR: This new album rocks, and it rocks in many different ways. It rocks electrically, and it rocks acoustically. While we were setting up this interview I said, "By the way, we're a solar powered radio station," since it also will broadcast. What do you think of solar power?

AW: We're trying to get off the grid, for sure. This summer, when we're touring, every time the tour bus pulls in to fuel up, I kind of grind my teeth because we have a multitude of buses, and every time they have to fill up, it's a tooth grinder.

NW: At home, we do the smallest carbon footprint possible, and we have hybrid cars. We really try to reuse everything, throw everything in the right bin, and we don't use plastic bottles because we have water filters at home and we use canteens. So, we're eco-friendly as much as we can get away with, but it would be awesome to be completely off the grid.

AW: We had some wind power and some solar power over at the farm in Seattle for a while, but we're still upgrading as technology allows.

MR: It's great to hear that we're talking with "Eco-friendly Heart."

NW: Well, we're sisters, and we're women, and we've had our ear to the ground, listening to Mother Earth for a long time as songwriters, and what Mother Earth is going through right now is pretty drastic, and we're feeling it too. We need the playground of Mother Earth and the bosom of Mother Earth to still be around for our kids, and the kids of our kids, as beautifully as she was there for us. So, we must be the custodians, harder than ever.

MR: That's really beautifully said.

NW: That's our mother! There's a lot of disrespect to our mother going on.

MR: There really is. So, let's talk about another one of the songs on this album, which comes to mind?

AW: I'd say "WTF," you know?

MR: Okay, "WTF" it is.

AW: The song is probably the son of "Barracuda," not on purpose necessarily, but this song came out of a blast of feeling that happened from looking in the mirror after making a series of repetitive, stupid mistakes.

MR: Like everyone, I guess.

AW: Like everyone, and expecting a different result, but not getting it, and finally just looking and saying, "What...!!" There is a lot of anger in the song, and frustration, but also a very clear message of hope to it because you're talking to yourself.

MR: That's wonderful, and no one does hope and anger better than Heart.

AW & NW: (laugh)

MR: Let's go to the news. Anything interesting on your radar?

AW: Yeah. All of a sudden, there's a country song that says I don't know the difference between Iraq and Iran. Did you hear that last night on CNN?

NW: No, really?

AW: That's igno-licious. And all of a sudden, we're in Afghanistan because, suddenly, that's what it's all about. There are a whole bunch of people that are going to have to have their post traumatic stress dealt with in some way, when they get home, yet we don't have the healthcare to cover that, really. What else do you want to talk about? It's a f**king pickle, is what it is.

MR: The interesting thing is that we have smart people that are in charge right now. Of course, everybody is on Obama's case for everything because he inherited the worst possible conditions, in every field, and we're kind of impatient with him getting things done. On the other hand, I can see the argument because things really aren't getting done as quickly as they need to be, in my opinion.

NW: When have they ever been able to get done as quickly as they need to be, though?

MR: You're right. Doesn't that go hand in hand with our ADD culture?

NW: Yeah, I think America is kind of the teenager of the world.

MR: That's pretty interesting. But have we regressed? We used to be adults, I thought.

AW: We thought we were.

NW: Well, people used to go to school, know how to spell and write papers, and were a little more educated, you know? On the world stage we're getting dumber, and dumber, compared to many of the more well-informed countries, and when people go like, "Iraq, Iran, what's the difference?" That's the case in point. We don't even know what the war is or who we're fighting and why, or why we didn't start in Afghanistan.

MR: And didn't we learn anything from Russia?

AW: That's a real storm front for me because I'm a real history buff, and it's just amazing to me how we've got this short little span of attention for huge things that have happened in the past, and it's just not possible now for anyone to remember these lessons from history.

MR: Ann, what is the deal, with the wars especially? The Afghanistan thing was in our face, that was such a humiliation to Russia, so that should have been one of the first obvious things to us. Of course, we went in there at first because of 9/11, but at the same time, every time we step into war in a major way, it's the corporations that are taking us to war, it seems to me. It's not even the brain trust that we elected into office, and it's like we're being dictated to by, well, the oil companies, and we had an oil administration, so, that made perfect sense.

AW: Yeah, and you can feel that even if you're just a plebe down here on the street and you watch the news. You can feel the fact that someone else is pulling the strings. You can feel that the strings are being pulled by people who are invisible to us.

MR: Yeah, it used to be the "shadow government," except they don't really care about being all that shadowy anymore, do they.

AW: (laughs) Right, I know. I don't blame people for feeling so powerless, but I'm from a generation that just goes, "Powerless, shmowerless. You have to still mouth off." You have to continue on.

NW: Try to understand and try to educate yourself enough to know what it is at least. I think the pop culture just takes us down the sheep dip, you know? It's like, "Okay, all you sheep, we're going to herd you over here into all this reality television." The "car crash" television--meaning the television that you just cannot look away from--I think it's really the dumbing of America. It replaces other information, where people could be preparing themselves to make a better world with less war, and just to know more--how to vote, how to help the administration, how to complain, and how to write their senators.

MR: Exactly, especially these days when you've got Fox News representing The Tea Party, and you've got Glenn Beck doing all of his nonsense.

NW: Yeah, there's so much polarization, it's just ridiculous. And the whole rapture thing? It's just like, "Wow."

MR: I was really shocked and saddened by the whole Qur'an burning thing. I didn't realize pockets of our country could be that stupid.

AW: And suddenly he just changed his mind. It was like, "Oh, some power must have been brought to bear on that guy."

MR: Yeah, or money.

AW: Or money. He was just selling his furniture on eBay, right, to finance his church? So, it's like, "Oh yeah, I'm ready to back off of my big thing, but I'm rich now, surprisingly."

MR: What a surprise.

NW: America just needs to educate.

AW: I agree.

MR: You're right on, and I just wish education was as high a priority as I remember it being. I'm with you, and I'm in the same age group, so I remember when that was an important thing.

AW: The way we become no longer a super power is if we're super stupid.

MR: Yeah. Okay, let's get back into the Red Velvet Car and be happy.

AW: It's okay, this is life, and we're all living it. It's great that we get to talk about it, you know?

MR: I know, and what was sweet was that you were sharing your thoughts so articulately, and you were so right on. I agreed with everything you said, and I wish this country well, but we really have to get our heads out of...

NW: ...out of our reality TV!

MR: Nice. Let's keep this rolling by telling me what track you'd like to discuss next.

NW: How about "Hey You?"

MR: What's the story behind that?

NW: "Hey You" is a song that I had rolling around in my brain for almost ten years, but I could not for the life of me come up with the "one more thing" it needed. I tried one thing that didn't work, then I'd try something else a couple of years later that wouldn't work, and over the years it just wasn't finished until we ran into Ben Mink and started working on this album. I pulled it out again and I said, "Do you have another part? This song needs a part." And he definitely had the perfect part.

MR: What's the working relationship like in the studio?

AW: What an amazing artist and a funny guy and extremely intelligent. He's intellectual, but also able to tell tall tales from his road, and his past. We were first turned onto his work when he was working with k.d. lang on the Ingenue album, and that really stuck with us. I think we tried to contact him in the '90s, but we couldn't get together because he was busy doing other stuff. Then, when I was going to do a solo album several years ago, it worked out that we could work together. Well, we brought Nancy in to work on my solo album, of course, and Nancy and Ben Mink just hit it off. It was like they were siblings, too. They are like total guitar and strings siblings, and to hear them play together is uncanny. It's almost like they're cut from the same (cloth), you know?

MR: So, he's sort of like an unofficial member at this point.

NW: Yes. In Red Velvet Car sessions, we played mostly just with Ben, myself, bass, and drums, and Ann singing, so those were all the basics. That's how we played everything at once, together, at the same time, and in the same room with eye contact. The conversation of that, you can really hear on the album because it's definitely not layered, digitally constructed stuff.

MR: That's pretty important these days, isn't it? I was just talking with the Goo Goo Dolls the other day, and John Rzeznik was discussing how important it was for that group to sit down in a room, and finally reconnect with each other during the recording process.

NW: How rare that stuff is these days.

AW: Yeah, I never thought I'd live to see the day when the natural process of musicians playing together would be something that you had to try to return to. That's the core, primal thing, really.

NW: You mean, actually playing and singing?

AW: (laughs) It's this new thing, actually singing and playing.

MR: Well, with Pro Tools and the like, you can pretty much just throw on a part and say, "There it is."

NW: You can pretty much construct things out of other things, right?

MR: Right, and you don't even need to be able to sing because we've got a pitch corrector for that.

AW: Oh boy, don't get me started.

MR: No, let's get you started.

AW: If I had money for every take I had to redo because I sang something off pitch, (laughs) I'd be rich.

MR: I'm with you, and if a pitch corrector was never invented, I don't think we'd have a Top Ten right now.

AW: And it's funny how that pitch correction thing has a digital thing that goes through it, kind of making people sound anonymous.

MR: Yes. It makes them generic, good point.

NW: It's really hard to distinguish a lot of the singers now.

MR: It's like a lot of the Disney-ish or American Idol-ish kids who are making records follow this template that have this same three note interval span in the chorus, and you have to include a sixth or a fourth in there so it has a tiny bit of emotion, or I guess that's what it's supposed to do.

NW: Interesting, yeah, you're right.

MR: Then you have, of course, the soulless block vocal that sounds like every other block vocal.

AW: It's interesting because it's also affected the sound or the way people sing without pitch correction. If you hear a lot of new singers, the vowels and the way they change notes almost sound pitch corrected already. So, it's become the new accent of pop music singing.

MR: Wow, people trying to emulate pitch correctors. So, being a fan since Day One, what's great is that you've always got stuff coming down the pike, like your new DVD.

NW: Yeah, there's a new DVD coming in the Spring of a Seattle show we did at The Sky Church, and that has a few of the new songs, and Ben Mink plays fiddle and guitar on that DVD as a guest star, and Alison Krauss comes out to sing a couple of songs with us as well. So, look for the DVD this spring.

MR: You know, this is a really interesting period for Alison Krauss. There's that album Robert Plant did with her.

NW: That album was amazing.

MR: I like the cross-pollination.

AW: I like it, too. It's really great for us because a lot of the time people sort of put us in this box that's really small. It's like, "They do rock music." But we like lots of types of music, and Americana is no exception. Alison is squirming to get out of her box too, so when we met and sang together and became friends and everything, it was a really great stretch for all of us.

MR: Yeah, and with Robert Plant. I couldn't believe I was listening to that.

AW: He, of course, on that record, is singing so great, and some people are sort of like, "Well gee, he's supposed to sing like he did in Led Zeppelin, where he's up there real high, screaming and wailing." Well, he is more sexy, I think, when he croons, you know? If that's possible, for Robert Plant to be more sexy than Led Zeppelin? I really think, for instance, on the song "Nothin," on Raising Sand, he's just on. There are a couple of moments that are just so amazingly sexy, and they're great.

MR: Have you reached out to him because, you know, you do have a history there.

AW: Haven't reached out to him, but we did get to meet. We went to see the Alison Krauss-Robert Plant show at The Greek Theater a couple of years back, and we got to talk with him afterward and hang out a bit. We had a little talk, and it was a little bit stilted because Zeppelin has always been a man's things, and they heard that we cover their stuff. So, the two of us kind of went, "Oh, hello." It was so amazing for me to try and forget that he is so amazingly powerful in his presence and just talk to him like a human being. It was a great moment for me.

MR: Right. I feel like what you said earlier is so true about perceptions; people don't allow artists to grow in a lot of cases. Regarding the Robert Plant thing, none of us should really be surprised by that, just as Heart doing really beautiful acoustic music should not be a surprise. You get to grow in your art, the way you want to grow in it, and I think your fans, for the most part, have come along with you.

AW: They have, and it speaks well because that takes attention span, and Heart people really have it, they really do.

MR: I feel like there's so much that you've gone through over the years that you could probably write a book about life on the road, about music, and about the music industry, right?

AW & NW: (laugh)

NW: It would be like when people ask, "What do you say to people that are coming up?" What is it really? It is a business, even though you don't really want to think of it as a business. I think without some kind of true calling and dogged determination and survival mechanisms built in, you shouldn't even try. Turn back, unless you're really burning up with passion, desire, and a purpose to do this, you know? I think, like probably a lot of things in the world, to do something really well, especially something a little bit outside of the box, there just isn't a lot of context for it, and it can be the loneliest, most heartbreaking world you can try to do something in. Ann and I, I think, should consider ourselves really lucky because we have each other and we're sisters and confidants. But there are others--like Sarah McLachlan and Chrissie Hynde--who have sort of done it on their own, and I don't know how they do that. I don't know if I could do that. Anyway, becoming an upstart now, with the way the attention span is so short and the pitch correction aspect of music making people kind of anonymous, it narrows the field, and I think it might even be tougher than before.

AW: Yeah, I think it probably is.

NW: With the imaging of everything now, I'd just say that if you have a soulful, poetic ear for doing some music, go underground or go rock, and do all the work.

AW: Do the work. Don't expect one day to be in your bedroom with your hairbrush, looking at the mirror, and the next day be like Lady Gaga. That happens to, maybe, one millionth of one percent of all the people in the world. If you want to spend ten years in the pipeline, forming a musical soul and putting all the miles in, then maybe you're going to be unusual, and you might stay around a little bit.

MR: Very nice. I always ask artists the question, "What advice do you have for new artists," and you've already answered it perfectly.

NW: Becoming competent takes a little time, and that will give you enough time to figure out whether you're built for it, too.

MR: That's good advice because a lot of people go into it without realizing that they're in it for the long haul once they've committed.

NW: Yeah, for better and for worse.

MR: Seriously, the whole fantasy of the American Idol "win" is exactly that, and for people that are getting into this for their art, it's not going to matter. They're going to do exactly what you said.

NW: People always ask us, and it always really amazes me because we have some albums that have been "hits" and some that aren't. So, when we have one that isn't, people say, "Well, why do you make albums? Are you going to make any more albums?" The answer, of course is, "Yes," because that's what we do as functioning musicians. We don't live and die by our sales. And it's for the love of music and the way people come back to us and say, "Oh, you saved my life with your music." It's so meaningful to people when you can reach them and they can hear your music and you can share your music with them. It's completely meaningful.

MR: Do you have any information about your tour?

AW: Yeah, it's been going on now for several months, and it's going to be going on solidly until the end of September. Then, we'll be doing a few more dates through the end of the year. We'll take thirty seconds off for Christmas, and then, ten seconds later, we'll be back out on the road.

MR: Are you doing any Rockin' New Years Eves?

AW: I guess not because I can see our manager shaking her head, so I guess not.

MR: I'll share just one tiny story with you. When I moved on from one of my jobs, I was packing my office and played "Strong, Strong Wind" like it was a loop. That was my "time to move on" song.

AW & NW: Oh, yeah.

MR: That particular Heart recording was very touching to me, so I'll just throw that out there.

NW: That's what music does to people, and that's how it orchestrates our lives and protects us through our lives, as well. The songs that we take with us are our protectors.


Source

Seattle Times: New DVD Chronicles Heart Concert in Seattle

Nancy and Ann Wilson are two of Seattle's most famous names. Making up the rock band Heart, they've sold more than 35 million albums worldwide.

Last March, the sisters — now 56 and 60, respectively — filmed an upcoming DVD, "Heart: Night at Sky Church" in Seattle. There's a free showing of the film Friday night at Experience Music Project |Science Fiction Museum.

The March concert was an intimate glimpse of the popular '70s rock group, which played new songs from the album "Red Velvet Car" (due out Tuesday) and old hits, like "Crazy on You." Alison Krauss joined in as guest artist on the mike and fiddle.

Nancy Wilson spoke recently by phone from Albuquerque about the DVD and the rock scene today.

Q: What was it like playing to a hometown crowd?

A: It's always really fun to play in Seattle. We love our own hometown so much. ... Ann is living in Seattle all the time and I still have a place in Seattle. I have to spend a lot of time in L.A., but I always get to Seattle whenever I can.

Q: Why did it take six years for this new album?

A: We've been pretty busy being moms. ... Ann did a solo album since "Jupiters Darling," called "Hope & Glory." ... Plus, we did a children's book for the anniversary of "Dog & Butterfly" and another version of "Dog & Butterfly" for Amazon.

Q: What is the new album like?

A: It's very hard rock acoustic — that's something Heart does that you don't really find elsewhere very much. ... It's not a digitally constructed sound at all, or a layered sound. It's a very on-the-spot, human conversational sound.

Q: Over the years, have you seen more women enter the business?

A: There are more women that are successful in pop culture, but as far as rock 'n' roll is concerned, I don't really see any. ... When you see Lady Gaga, it's unbelievable to see what she's done with her image. I know she's quite talented, too, but it's the image that makes you notice, more than what she sounds like. It's like, wow, is that what it takes anymore?

Q: How do you and Ann get along?

A: Our relationship is really strong. We tour together through the summer. We work on songs together. ... The kids come out with us on the tour. We're really a family business.

Q: How do you two stay friends?

A: We are rare that way. We're a military family ... being shuttled around from base to base. We still feel like we have our little fighting unit out here, but instead of guns, we have guitars ... spreading the good word with our music, town to town.


Source

Ann and Nancy in Parade Magazine!

There will be an interview with Ann and Nancy in the September 19th issue of Parade! :D

Soundspike Q&A: Nancy Wilson of Heart

With a new generation being introduced to Heart annually thanks to the inevitable performance of "Alone" by "American Idol" contestants, the Wilson sisters are enjoying their popularity.

While packing theaters and amphitheaters around the U.S., Heart is now introducing fans to new music courtesy of "Red Velvet Car," a collection of songs due out Aug. 31. It is the band's first new studio album in six years.

"We're real excited," guitarist/singer Nancy Wilson said during an interview with SoundSpike. "We've been setting it up since we finished it, really. It's getting close to the time -- as they say -- it'll 'drop.' [Laughs] It'll drop. It sounds like somebody comes out of the sky and crashed into the Earth."

Wilson, who is joined in the band by singer Ann Wilson, spoke to SoundSpike about "Red Velvet Car," working with producer Ben Mink and the unique sounds of acoustic instruments.

SoundSpike: The shows are getting great reviews. You must be very pleased.

Nancy Wilson: I've seen a couple of really good ones. I'm very happy about that. It's nice when you work this hard and [are] acknowledged for it.

On Aug. 31, you're releasing the album "Red Velvet Car." What can you tell me about it?

In many ways, we're so happy and proud of the album. In some ways, we don't want it to drop. It's almost like having a baby: "OK then the real scary stuff starts." The baby comes into the world and some people don't think it's adorable. Hopefully most people will.

Did you record this album any differently than you have your past records?

Yeah, we worked with Ben Mink, who's an amazing producer from Vancouver, BC, who we'd always hoped to get together for Heart. I think his direction was exactly where we wanted to go. He took us back in a way, back to an updated -- but yet more original -- Heart sound. It sort of comes from the acoustic guitar as a rock 'n' roll instrument. It's hard-rock acoustic. It's a little different.

Did you decide before you recorded the album that that was what you were going to do, or did it come out that way organically?

We had a powwow. We talked about the direction and the sound and the ethic that we wanted on the album. That's what Ben Mink does best, and his partner David Leonard, who's actually out of Nashville. They record acoustic instruments, kind of like that T-Bone Burnett thing where you really hear the wood and you really hear the humanity of acoustic instruments, which is unusual. You get all the passion of the acoustic instruments. That's where we started, the sound we wanted to start with, as well as the performance aspect where you're playing at the same time, in the same room with people looking at each other. That's part of the sound too. That's not stuff that's layered on in a computer. It's very, very real.

Why was now the time for this project?

Well, the last studio album Heart did was about five-and-a-half, six years ago. Ann did the solo album since then with Ben Mink called "Hope and Glory." You know, we've been out working on summer tours every summer to keep the rent paid. It's what we do. I think we need to be songwriters and we need to be current with our creative juices in order to feel vital. So we wrote the songs and we wrote another album because it's what we need to do. It's what we're put here to do. It's what we love to do. It makes no financial sense to do it because we do it all out of pocket. It's not set up anymore the way it used to be, where you have a record company that's there to develop you and support you. We had to do it on our own and hopefully gain the interest of somebody like Sony, who we're lucky to be with.

How many new songs are you playing live?

Depending on the situation, we're playing, like, three of the new songs live right now. The DVD, though, we have a couple more.

How's the reaction been to the new songs?

It's actually been amazing. The new songs, it's hard to get people to sit still for that because it's not familiar. But they have been really responsive to the new songs. I think particularly because they sound familiar in a way because they sound very much like Heart. The people who come to our shows are coming to see us. I think they recognize the character of the new songs and accept them really readily. I'm very excited about that. If I go to a rock show, somebody I love, and they play a new song, I'm kind of like, "Oh great. What's that going to be like?" You go to see your favorite rock performer do stuff you recognize, when you hear some new stuff and you like it, it's really a treat.

Your music has really stood the test of time. I think part of it is due to soundtracks, as well as "Guitar Hero."

And "American Idol" has something to do with that. "Alone," everybody does "Alone" on "American Idol." People probably don't remember as well that we originally did that song. A lot of other people have been doing it since. When the songs can withstand the test of time like that and keep re-emerging in the culture somehow, and they connect the dots between us and the new generation and the older generations, it's really exciting. That's the coolest thing of all. Being a mom now, I have two twin 10-year-old boys. They are the future. They come to my rock shows and see Auntie Ann and their mom up there rockin' on stage. They really like the new stuff too.

What song still thrills you to play?

I have a lot of thrills playing a lot of these songs. "Barracuda" is always really fun. It's a big rocker. Right now for the ballad we're having a big resurgence with a new version of "Dog and Butterfly" that we put together with a new sort of arrangement. "Alone" is one of those, too. We've reinterpreted it to a more acoustic arrangement. It's very fun to play.

Wonderful Q&A with Ann!

Really great interview with Ann. Love how she describes her relationship with Nancy! :D

Heart is releasing their next studio album, Red Velvet Car on August 31. We recently sat down with Ann Wilson, lead singer and talked about the evolution of the band, their recording process and what it’s like balancing life on the road and being a mom.

Citadel Digital: You and the band have come a long way since 1976’s Dreamboat Annie. What inspired you to write and record Red Velvet Car?

Ann Wilson: We have made quite a few albums since Dreamboat Annie. Red Velvet Car will be the 13th studio album. We’re just artists. So we just always are inspired to make new albums because we’re artists.

CD: Does making a record still give you that same sense of excitement that it did 34 years ago?

AW: Of course it has. Every time we write a bunch of new songs, it might as well be the first album for us. We always just have a great time and are always very excited. It’s the first time we’ve been on a major label since the 70s. We’re excited because the people at Sony are excited, too. Everybody’s working really hard to make sure people know about this record. That’s pretty thrilling for us.

CD: How has your recording process changed?

AW: We’re just better off in the studio now because we know how to record. Our first album, we were pretty green, of course. We have learned a lot since then. Now we look forward to using all of the technology, and getting sounds, and developing the songs. It’s really great.

CD: What kind of sound were you going for on Red Velvet Car and how do you think that fits into the evolution of Heart?

AW: We have definitely gone for on Red Velvet Car a real warm, active sound. A lot of the songs were played all together in the same room at the same time, so they are really actual live performances. I think that they are great for these times because it provides more variety, more different kinds of things to listen to. You can listen to the real digital, put-together type of stuff, and you can listen to stuff that’s live and honest. I think it will fit in fine.

CD: Many of the tracks on Red Velvet Car seem to be about moving forward and the process of personal evolution. Were any of these songs inspired by personal experiences?

AW: Yeah, they all were. All the songs are autobiographical on this record. They are about travel and friendship and just about different things that have happened to us. About love and they’re all real.

CD: Did you want your audience to learn anything from Red Velvet Car?

AW: I would just hope that they would listen to it and enjoy it. It’s not really an instructional thing. It’s more of something for them to take into their lives and listen to personally or with friends and get off on it. Like the songs, listen to the poetry and hopefully understand something about us and how these songs can fit into their own lives.

CD: Heart has loyal fans that have been there since the ‘70s, some who came in during the ‘80s and ‘90s and maybe some that just found you with the last studio album. What does that feel like to look out from the stage and see so many different generations of faces singing along with your songs?

AW: It feels really great. It especially feels great when you see the children and the young people because they are getting a sense of music history when they come to a Heart show. That’s for a lot of them, roots stuff. And it feels very good. It also feels good to see their parents there, too, of course, because they are very loyal.

CD: Did you record Red Velvet Car with any age group in mind, and how do you think the new album will appeal to younger audiences?

AW: We did not record the album with any age group in mind. We just sort of know who our fans are. We know who comes out to the shows. It’s a wide demographic group. We were just trying to appeal to people in general and just to be honest ourselves. I think it will be great. We are already getting a lot of good radio play on a couple of the songs: “Hey You” and “WTF.” We’re a multi-dimensional band. We don’t just do one kind of thing all the time. We have several different faces. I think there are ways for different kinds of people and ages to latch onto it.

CD: What are you enjoying the most about your tour right now?

AW: The time on stage is hands down the best part of it. The travel is really extreme and difficult, but the time on stage makes it all worthwhile. The people last night, we played in Baltimore, and the people were just crazy out of their head. It was just really fun. So it’s as good as it ever was for us, and that is really saying something when you have been together as long as we have.

CD: With all that travel, how do you find a balance between your public, private and professional lives?

AW: Well, when we are home and not doing this, we are really home. And we’re pretty private. Nancy and I both have children. We have two each, so it’s really important that we be there for them. They come out on the road when they can. So we are with them every day whether it’s in person or calling back and forth several times a day at least. It’s a tightrope walk, of course, and as mothers we have to try really hard, REALLY hard, to move heaven and earth to talk to them every day no matter where we are. It can be done.

CD: We’ve heard lots of stories how Ray and Dave Davies of The Kinks have fought for 40 years and how Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis have a weird sibling relationship. We’ve never really heard horrible things about you and Nancy. So, in a sense, you are wonderful family role models. What advice would you have for new bands made up of family members?

AW: I think that even though you are siblings, if you are gonna work together as friends and as fellow artists, it’s important to remember that any relationship needs work. You have to really be careful and treat it gently. So the relationship that Nancy and I have is a friendship, and we really are careful to give each other space and know when to say what to each other. We’re very cautious with our friendship because it’s very precious. Having said that, I think we’re lucky because we like each other. We have a really good sense of humor together, and that’s really important in this life. And I just happen to think that Nancy is extremely talented. And as an artist, I’m thrilled to be able to stand next to her on stage every night. For me, that’s worth working on a relationship for.

CD: What can we expect next, from Heart?

AW: When the album comes out, we, of course, will be doing some touring to support it. I’ve heard them talking about us going to Europe in the new year, and spreading the word around about Red Velvet Car and ourselves. I think Nancy and I in the future might record an album just the two of us. And we each have our various things we like to do. We like to be home, and just be people. I see more of the same: more playing, more singing, more writing. Just more living in the world.


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Nancy in the October Issue of Guitar World!

I was holding out so much hope that she'd be in this issue! Yay! :D And another gorgeous shot from Amber McDonald. Can't wait until these are released :)

Scans credit to: Heart-Music

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Nancy Interview with Entertainment Weekly!

This is a REALLY great interview! And look at this picture! My goodness she is gorgeous. Thanks to my friend Mindy for showing me this link :)

In the 1970s, Heart—featuring wild-haired Seattle sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson—filled arenas with their muscular, commanding hard-rock anthems: “Crazy on You,” “Magic Man,” “Barracuda.” In the ’80s they did it again, albeit with a lot more AquaNet.

The ’90s and ’00s have been quieter, more focused on family and side projects like the Lovemongers and Nancy’s frequent soundtrack collaborations (Almost Famous, Jerry Maguire, and Vanilla Sky among them) with her husband, filmmaker Cameron Crowe.

This summer, however, Heart returns after a six-year hiatus with new album, Red Velvet Car, to be released August 31, and a tour to support it through late September. EW spoke to Nancy about coming up as one of the first (and finest) female guitarists in the testosterone world of stadium rock, working out the band’s new album, and who’s on her personal playlist.

EW: So before this interview, I was doing some research and ended up going on kind of a YouTube bender watching old Heart clips. Do you find yourself ever revisiting those, or have your kids [Wilson and Crowe are parents to ten-year-old twin boys] ferreted them out?

Nancy Wilson: You mean like a Heart marathon? My boys are ten, and they’ve seen a few things, but I don’t intentionally take them there [laughs]. It can be kind of embarrassing because of the hairdos and the kinds of fashion statements that we thought we needed to make in those various eras. I mean, was there ever enough hairspray? But the boys see a few things and they go, “Is that you?” and it’s kind of cute because it’s like “Yes, Mama has lived many lifetimes.” We started very, very young, and I was about 20 when our first album came out—that’s a lot of lives ago.

EW: When the Runaways movie was released earlier this year, so many people were dubbing it the story of the first female rock band. But even though your band was co-ed, I tend to think of Heart as one of the first true girl rock bands, because you didn’t have a Svengali-type figure like Kim Fowley…

NW: Well, there is a definite sound with all-girl bands, a good rudimentary sound, and that’s what’s cool and punk about all-girl bands, that you still find, largely—it’s really kind of primal. We’ve always been more …. weird compared to most bands, girls or no. We’re a pretty heavy rock band with an acoustic element, and I’m still trying to find one who compares, can you? [Laughs] So I guess we made our own category somehow.

EW: Did you feel like you had to fight a lot of sexism coming up, as women in hard rock, or did you feel that they welcomed you?

NW: It was definitely about skill. Starting out, we were quite little and we had no perception of what boys and girls were supposed to do, so we were basically aimed like pistols, without a sexual reference to go to. Unlike other rock people who had every battle to win, we had parents who said “You’re good at this, you could probably do this.” I think in some ways that was because of Ann’s naturally incredible voice—she was just way off the scale talent-wise, which our parents recognized as a gift. [Later though] it was like The Wizard of Oz: “I’d turn back if I were you! Tigers and bears, oh my…” because it is not a path I would advise most people to go.

I did go see the Runaways movie, though—I went to the premiere actually because I really wanted to see it, and I thought it was a really good movie. It was nothing like our experience, however. For one thing, we were West Coast suburban kids, and we grew up a few years earlier, coming out of a very mind-expanded early ‘70s era—that psychedelic, Beatles-y, homegrown sort of “anything is possible, change the world for the better with music” atmosphere… not a big-city, hard-knocks, druggie Svengali atmosphere. We had the idea as women that we could walk into music and be good at it, and be as good as any man, and have a career in it without being taken advantage of. So basically, those things came true. The obstacle course was just more difficult than we ever anticipated. We were optimistic and very naïve.

EW: I had read before that you wrote the song “Barracuda” in response to an ad your record company [at the time] released hinting that you and your sister were sexually involved..

NW: That’s absolutely true. We were that naïve and that idealistic that we were shocked that somebody would insinuate that it was not about the ethic of the music, and this sounds really silly maybe but coming from our era, the sexuality was more androgynous, it was all-encompassing. So when somebody implied to us, “Oh two girls, yeah!” it was a real old-man sexuality, and really insulting.

EW: So you’ve got this album of all new songs, Red Velvet Car, and some old material as well?

NW: Well, that’s a concert DVD that’s coming after the album, which is ten new songs.

EW: How do you create new music now, if you and Ann aren’t living in the same city?

NW: Well, I’m in LA, my kids are in school here. But I get on a plane and I go to Seattle, I go to where Ann is. And we woodshed at my farm near Seattle—we break out the guitars and microphones and cups of coffee and we’re just there with our notebooks and our poetry and everything we’ve tried to gather up in the previous year. All those ideas that kind of swirl around while you’re looking the other way, songs are writing themselves inside your soul, and we try to capture those things intentionally. All our new songs are definitely straight out of real life.

EW: What’s your favorite one on the album? Or is that like choosing a favorite kid?

NW: Wow, yeah. That’s an impossibility!

EW: Well, how about which one you’re looking forward to performing on the tour this summer?

NW:Well, my favorite one to perform is one that I get to sing called “Hey You,” and people are really responding well to it, it’s getting a lot of radio airplay at [mock-serious voice] adult contemporary. You gotta feel good about that. And the one called “WTF,” which is most-added on rock radio.

EW: Is it strange to have singles simultaneously in two such different formats?

NW: I think that’s the way things happen more these days. You have a song for iTunes, one for Amazon, maybe one you put out to radio for one demographic, maybe older people or rock radio, and one for another. But at our show, we have little kids, we have teenagers, college kids and people our age and people older than us, coming out to our shows. Heart is fun for the whole family! It’s really lovely to see the past connecting to the future.

EW: Are you working on anything currently with your husband?

NW:Not right now, because the plate is absolutely full with the new album and the tour. But yeah, at some point later I think once the album has been successfully delivered into the culture and the kids are back at school—you know there are so many musical directions I can take, and it’s beautiful to have so many musical opportunities. I don’t have to go work at a bank or go to a day job. I think my calling is to be a musician, and I hope I get to do that for the rest of my life.

EW: Speaking of generations, are there any newer artists you’ve been listening to lately?

NW: I really enjoy Owl City, you know, Adam Young? Pink I love, Lady Gaga is awesome. I really like a lot of the stuff my kids like, even though they can’t tell me who it is half the time, it’s all playlists [laughs]. But there’s some really great stuff that’s new—good songwriting and singing. Even though a lot of it can be digitally constructed, I think a lot of them, like Adam Young, use the digital construct in a way that sounds poetic and emotional, and that’s turned technology on its ear, in a way. We don’t really use that technology so much in Heart—we really sing, we really play, only live music. We don’t run ProTools at our shows, for instance, which is more rare these days then not. But I love some of this new stuff.


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Heart Back to Classic '70s Sound

Heart's Wilson sisters and their classy Red Velvet Car are nicely draped in Mink these days -- Ben Mink, that is.

The Canadian producer teams with rock and roll's dynamic duo, singer Ann Wilson and guitarist Nancy Wilson, and their bandmates on their new album Red Velvet Car (Eagle Rock). The tour supporting Red Velvet Car brings Heart to Harris Park this week for the seventh edition of Rock the Park.

"That is the Ben Mink effect," Nancy Wilson said from Los Angeles recently, after hearing praise for the superb guitar textures and drives on Red Velvet Car. "He and his engineer-mixer David Leonard famously get incredible guitar sounds."

Mink isn't a member of Heart. He can be heard with Heart, along with U.S. roots music superstar Alison Krauss, as a guest on a DVD set for release as a complement to the Aug. 31-dropping Red Velvet Car.

Mink had worked with Ann Wilson on a solo project. He also checked out Heart and found a way to bring the rockers full-circle to a new take on their classic sound from the 1970s.

"When he imprinted our band, he saw that, he saw the same thing that we started out being, that acoustic nucleus inside a rock format, with -- of course --Ann's voice, which is signature," Nancy Wilson said. "He went all the way there with that aspect of our sound which we thought was pretty genius."

That genius plays out on Red Velvet Car with an assortment of strings including guitar, mandolin, dobro, banjo, fiddle, viola, cello and autoharp, all played by Nancy Wilson and Grammy-winning Mink.

Using B.C. as a base at first, Ann Wilson and her younger sister, Nancy, blasted off during the 1970s with songs such as Crazy on You, Magic Man and Barracuda.

Heart's hits continued into the 1980s and into the 1990s with These Dreams, Alone, What About Love, If Looks Could Kill and Never among the 21 Top 40 markers for the band. Heart has sold more than 30 million records.

Mink is helping them sell more. Born in the U.S., but a Canadian since the late 1960s, Mink has worked with k.d. lang, Rush, Barenaked Ladies and others -- all the way back to Murray McLauchlan's Silver Tractors.

It's another Canadian with a similar last name -- Sarah McLachlan -- who has been a key Heart ally as the band tours this summer with McLachlan's Lilith Fair.

"Sarah McLachlan is one of the coolest influences on the culture, not just women's culture, but the culture of human rights and awareness. We're there for her," Nancy Wilson said. Wilson said that Lilith Fair's cancellation of some dates have made it a target for media attention, even though other tours are also dropping dates.

"There's a negative spin on it. It's easy to pick on the women," Nancy Wilson said.

Rock and roll's most famous sister act are ready to drive right through such spin. It helps to have such a strong vehicle in Red Velvet Car, the first new studio album in six years for Heart.

Nine of the album's songs were written for the album. The closing track, Sand, is a beautiful new version of a song originally written and recorded by the Lovemongers, the sisters' 1990's acoustic side project.

Other standouts include Queen City, "a love letter" to Seattle music.

"It's like the Liverpool of America in many ways," Nancy Wilson said. "It's a seaport town with big music talent. They've had a lot of people coming from there from Ray Charles to Jimi Hendrix, the Wailers, the Sonics ... the grunge era was another wave of that."

The strongest track is WTF, which translates as just what you expect when Ann Wilson is shouting it out. It combines wisdom from journals kept by the sisters' late mother, Lois "Lou" Wilson, with a crunching riff from Heart guitarist Craig Bartock.

"That's just one of the big rockers. We have a variety of grapes in our vineyard. We put out varietals (a wine term) as our songs, " Nancy Wilson said. "That's definitely the 'hard rock variety' song."

After getting the full Mink customizing, WTF beats away as strongly as only Heart can.

"I think it sounds so extremely Heart as well, especially the pre-'80s version of Heart, the original sound of Heart, which could be really heavy rock with the acoustic rocking as hard as any electric in the sound," she said. "That's a little different from most rock and roll."


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Heart Guitarist Nancy Wilson Discusses Band's Career and New Album

Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson says a willingness to adapt is necessary for any band.

"It's a matter of survival to reinvent yourself," Wilson says during a recent phone interview.

"You have to double-check your relationship with your music," Wilson says of the band's ability to sustain success over multiple decades. "The thing that made you a star, that passion, needs to be atop your list of priorities."

On Tuesday, Wilson will bring her band to Bethlehem for a headlining performance on the RiverPlace main stage.

While the 1970s saw Nancy and her sister, Ann Wilson, create classic rock staples such as "Crazy On You" and "Magic Man," the band had continued commercial success in the '80s with the songs "These Dreams" and "Alone."

Now, 34 years after their first album, "Dreamboat Annie," debuted, Heart will be releasing one of their most vibrant albums of the past 20 years, "Red Velvet Car." The album will be released Aug. 31.

"It's a bit of old school and a bit of new school," Wilson says of "Velvet." "It was recorded live, giving everyone a chance to feed off each other, keep things fresh."

Musikfest concert-goers will get a chance to hear some of that new material as their tour set lists feature some of the new songs. Wilson says that during recent tour stops, they have been astonished by crowd reaction to the new songs.

"People were digging it," Wilson says.

Wilson added that the show will have a bigger set production than in previous years. "It will be a lovely experience," Wilson says.

Some of those in attendance will be younger audience members who have been exposed to the music of Heart through such movies as "Charlie's Angels" or through the video game "Guitar Hero," which has featured "Barracuda" and "Crazy On You" on various editions.

"'Guitar Hero' is a case of unbelievable luck," Wilson admits. "The fact that technology can bring the music of Heart and The Beatles into our living rooms, I think it's fantastic."

It has been well-documented that the Wilson sisters have been heavily influenced by The Beatles and Led Zeppelin, but Wilson says she continues to be influenced by different music.

Wilson cites Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers' recent album, "Mojo," as one of her current favorites.

"'Mojo' is such a great album. (Heartbreakers guitarist) Mike Campbell is one of the best players I always forget to mention on my favorites list. He is doing some astounding work on that one," Wilson says.


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Heart Still Beating Strong After Four Decades

GREAT interview with Nancy!


Turn on classic rock radio right now and it's likely that within the hour you will hear either "Barracuda," "Magic Man" or "Crazy on You," songs that date back to the mid-'70s heyday of Heart.

Now let's say the jock went rogue and swapped one of those out for "Queen City" or "Safronia's Mark" -- songs from the forthcoming Heart record, "Red Velvet Car." Chances are the universe wouldn't crumble. Fans actually might think they were old Heart hits that got past them the first time.

The first album in six years from the Wilson sisters, who bring Heart to the Trib Amphitheatre Friday, stays that true to the original sound.

"We don't really intentionally try to sound like ourselves," says guitarist-singer Nancy Wilson. "I think that would be overthinking. What happened with this one was, instinctively, the sound and the concept and the ethic that [producer] Ben Mink had in mind was the sound that caught people's ears originally. The band has a specific sound, like 'Dreamboat Annie,' that is pretty individual. There [aren't] a lot of bands that sound like this or have two female front people working in democracy with men."

Part of the magic at work on songs like "WTF" and "Hey You" was just making the record as honestly as possible.

"We tried to do something that was vital and authentic, analog versus digital. We went back into a room with people singing and playing at the same time, together, with eye contact, capturing performances, so you have this effect that is very human sounding. It's a musical conversation that is happening with people at a moment in time."

For the Wilsons, that conversation began in 1974 when Nancy joined Ann and the boys in Heart, and they invaded the male-dominated rock world with hard-edged hits from such classic albums as "Dreamboat Annie" and "Little Queen."

The band's current bio states that they were "the first women in rock" to lead a band, write the songs and play the instruments.

"There were not very many girls in rock 'n' roll together with men that had a heavy rock sound as well as a more acoustic sound like Heart," Nancy says. "If you look at things now, there still isn't anyone that has that sort of sound. We sort of occupy our own category in that way. We're not an all-girl band, at all. It's a whole different type of sound, and we're not Fleetwood Mac, kind of a pop-rock sound. In many ways, we might compare to The Pretenders more than others, but still we created our own category."

The closest female contemporaries may have been The Runaways, but as Nancy points out, "We were sort of just before that, and not an all-girl band that came up through a tough city situation. They really survived a tough beginning. We were different. We struck out on our own in suburbia with parents who actually helped us get where we needed to go. Ann's voice was the thing that our parents recognized as a real gift, and they knew if we set our minds to it and worked on our craft and became proficient in the music, we could probably survive. We were blessed a little bit with the opportunity to hone our craft before we were thrown out on the street."

Heart's run of success extended into the early '90s, at which point Nancy married writer/filmmaker Cameron Crowe and chose to take a break and raise a family, which consists of twin 10-year-old boys, William and Curtis.

"It took me longer to get my family going than I was expecting. I stayed home for five or six years. It was a good time for me to have a break from the same pattern we had been in. It gave me a chance to look from an outside perspective at the pattern of touring, touring, touring and writing albums and touring. I really did get to go home for a while and have kids and remember what it's like to have a life outside of a touring rock band. When I got back into it, it was a sweeter feeling, a beautiful reunion in many ways to remember how special this job is. You get to play music on a stage or in a studio and sing with your sister."

Nancy, 56, says the closeness with 60-year-old Ann, who has two adopted children of her own, has always made it easier to maintain her passion for the band.

"In the case of me and Ann, it makes it easier because A) we're from a tight family, we're military brats, Marine Corps family, so we don't really stop and take time for drama -- we move as a unit. And B) we have each other as confidants. I think because we're close friends, we can survive this business, because, after all, it is a business. We have each other to talk to and lean on, stay sane. I don't think I could do it without another girl or woman to do it with."

Among the challenges for Heart was surviving the abrupt changes in music that actually sprung up in their home base of Seattle with bands such as Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Alice in Chains.

"After the '80s, everything sort of caved in," she says. "The whole musical culture did a huge sea change. What was cool one minute was completely uncool the next day. With Nirvana and the Seattle sound, all the hair bands went to hell in a handbasket basically. We were afraid that we were one of those hair bands, even though we had started out before the '80s. We thought the Seattle bands would lump us into that category, but they didn't and when we got back to Seattle we crawled home with our tails between our legs, 'Oh, we're not worthy, we're not cool anymore.' They were like, 'Oooh, yes you are' and we started hanging out with those guys and they really hailed us for what we had done before the '80s. It was just an interesting pivotal time for us. They took us in."

Ann did some vocals with Alice in Chains, and at one point, Alice bassist Mike Inez even became a member of Heart.

While those connections were nice, they didn't do nearly as much for Heart as the band's placement in the "Guitar Hero" game series, which has dipped the average age at the shows over the past decade.

"That's the coolest thing ever," Nancy says. "They come to our shows, these little kids now. With 'Guitar Hero,' they started coming out three to five years ago, all these little kids up in the front row at the shows going 'Barracuda!' It's fantastic. It brings the awareness of our songs like 'Crazy on You' and 'Barracuda,' or 'Alone' with 'American Idol,' it's connecting our past with our present and into the future. You can't beat a good song to traverse the generations, I guess."


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Nancy Wilson Reflects on Heart's Career, Preps for Concert at MGM Grand at Foxwoods

Great new Nancy interview :)


With a sparkling new album coming soon and a major North American tour underway, one might think it’s the late 1970s all over again for Heart.

The highly-influential group, still powered by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, is in the midst of its latest renaissance. But it’s a long way from the ground-breaking, house-quaking days of “Crazy on You,” “Magic Man,” and “Barracuda.”

Those early mega-hits put Heart on the map to stay, and they’ve sold more than 30 million albums in the years since.

During a brief break from touring, strawberry-blonde sister Nancy Wilson spoke from Topanga, Calif. on a wide range of topics, including the band’s career, the culture shift they survived in the 1980s, her life as the mother of twin 10-year-old sons with husband and film director Cameron Crowe, and the new album, “Red Velvet Car,” which is slated for release Aug. 31.

With a father in the Marine Corps, the Wilson sisters traveled a lot as children, eventually settling in the Seattle area. But the band got its big break in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, where they were signed by the small label Mushroom Records in 1975. Heart’s first album, “Dreamboat Annie” turned into a massive hit, and on the surface, the group appeared to be overnight sensations.

“It did happen fast,” Wilson recalled. “But we worked for years before that album was released. You work and you write songs and you play clubs, you live on no sleep and bad food, you freeze and you put the work in - the blood, sweat and tears. You play a million uncomfortable shows in uncomfortable places and you deal with all modes of travel. Then when the album came out it was like – ‘Wow!’”

“We broke it regionally,” she said in reference to “Dreamboat Annie.”

“We got in the car almost like on ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ with our agent from little Mushroom Records in Vancouver. We drove across the country, took a few planes, went to Chicago, Detroit, we went to the actual radio stations and we’d put makeup on in the car before we’d meet the DJ or the program director (laughs). And then they’d think we were cute and we’d go back in the car and wait for our guy to do the payola. (laughs) There was a lot of that style of making it then.”

But she laments the loss of certain aspects of attaining stardom in this age of “American Idol.”

“I think people study their craft in front of mirrors and cameras and don’t do the shoe leather and the actual performing as much. I think that’s part of the reason there’s a resurgence for bands with history like Heart because we know how to play and we know how to sing.”

Indeed they do. Ann’s powerhouse voice and Nancy’s softer side and intricate work on a variety of stringed instruments has always been at the center of Heart’s sound, and it still is on “Red Velvet Car,” with its potential hits such as “WTF,” “Hey You,” and “Wheels.”

“WTF includes the lyric ‘The hardest thing you’ll ever learn is what bridge to cross and what bridge to burn,’ which was directly inspired by journal writings from the Wilsons’ late mother who passed away about four years ago.

“That was a really beautiful thing that I discovered in her writings,” Nancy Wilson recalled… “It’s kind of when you’re screaming at yourself, one of those human moments. I think my Mom captured it pretty well.”

“Red Velvet Car” is Heart’s first album that’s being released on a Sony-related label since 1983’s “Passionworks.”

“We’re a working band,” Wilson said. “We been touring every summer. When (Sony) heard some of the songs they got extra excited…the size of the company felt like a fit because they’re a big machine. In a lot of ways people are doing gorilla music from their basement these days, but for us it felt like the right time to reunite with Sony and do something big.”

The only time Heart took a major break was in the 1990s, when the sisters formed the acoustic side project the Lovemongers.

“We needed a change,” Wilson said in reference to the period. “Because the entire culture shifted: from the inflated, cocaine-addled, image-driven ’80s, into something grunge-based from Seattle. And when we came back to Seattle then, with our tails between our legs, we were really scared that we’d be rejected entirely by the cool music community. But the opposite was true and they took us under their wing and loved us like brothers – we jammed, had these hootenannies at Ann’s house, hung out and ended up on stages together. They’re still really close buddies, we’re still close to the guys in Alice in Chains, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden too, it’s very cool.”

Wilson and Crowe are the parents of 10-year-old twin boys. She says one of the boys has a very strong voice and a knack for recalling melodies he’s heard only once, while the other has a sharp poetic grasp for songs. The kids get a kick out of seeing mom on stage.

“They’re proud,” Wilson said. “They’re at a good age right now to see what’s happening. They actually like to sit through shows now and they play their air guitars and know the songs better. They really like the new songs, they like the new album, they picked ‘Hey You,’ - of course, I sing it - and ‘There You Go’ as their favorites.”

A few years ago the Wilson sisters tangled at a distance with none other than former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin after the music to the band’s song “Barracuda,” was used at the Republican National Convention in conjunction with Palin’s appearance the vice presidential nominee of the party.

Today Wilson appears to have mixed feelings about the whole dust up.

“I was the one who was quoted with the F word on that one and I’ll take full credit,” Wilson said with a laugh. “We were just offended and felt such a sense of unfairness to be represented artistically. It’s intellectual property, there should be better laws about it…You love being in America where you want to be in a system that supports the freedoms we do have. So even if it’s the side you’re not on, it’s still fun to be noticed.

Asked if she could have ever imagined herself doing something other than rock ‘n’ roll for a living, Wilson paused.

“Well, I would have to do something creative,” she said. “I’d go insane without a creative outlet. But I’m good at a lot of other things. I could probably do hair, makeup, work with animals. I could probably be a teacher.”

During college she studied German literature, and she laughed when reminded of that.

“My German is not what it used to be,” she said. “I studied it in university for a couple of years after high school. I mainly started learning German because the Beatles sang ‘Sie Liebt Dich’ (the German language recording of “She Loves You”).

When not working with sister Ann in Heart, she has composed several film scores for Crowe’s films including “Almost Famous” and “Vanilla Sky.” So she’s succeeded doing something that a lot of people struggle with – working alongside their family members.

Is there a secret to that?

“You have to be kind of different from most people in that you need to be able to really collaborate well and compromise but not be overpowered all the time either,” Wilson said. “You have to know what you want and work on that team and bring good things forward that benefit everyone. I think it’s a real skill. I think a lot of people have old family business and emotional things that they can’t surmount in order to just get past it and to something else. I think a lot of people are entangled in family dynamics and the dramas and have difficulty rising above all that stuff and getting work done together. In the case of me and Ann, probably because we were in a military family, a Marine Corps family, we did lots of traveling when we were young and we were very tight knit. There were so many new towns to arrive in, new schools to go to, we were already kind of on tour (laughs).

“We had a great family though, really funny and musical people all the way back to our grandparent, aunts and uncles. We spent a lot of time playing old Irish pub songs and Hawaiian songs on ukulele and telling stories at the campfire on the beach with the grandparents around. That’s something I want to try to give as much as I can to my kids.”


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Heart's Still In It: Ann and Nancy Wilson's New CD Marks A Rocking Return

It may be hard to believe but Heart still has a pulse.

One of the first hard rock groups to be fronted by a sister act, Ann and Nancy Wilson, the band started beating in the 1970s before flatlining in the early '80s when they experimented with a new sound.

When they returned to their roots in 1985, fans responded, sending three albums into the top five.

Now, Heart is pumping again. They play the MGM Grand at Foxwoods on Saturday, featuring songs from "Red Velvet Car," their first studio album in six years.

"We have been steadily working in our little rock 'n' roll sweatshop, in the soul of our rock 'n' roll planet," says Nancy Wilson in a voice that is more of a coo than the strong instrument she projects from the stage.

The CD is scheduled to drop on Aug. 31. To the guitar-playing sibling with the strawberry blond hair, it brings hope that it will return the band to the lofty heights it last enjoyed with "Heart" (1985), "Bad Animals" (1987) and "Brigade" (1990) — when singles like "These Dreams," "Alone," "What About Love" and "Never" sent the blood rushing through the veins of fans.

"It took a couple of years," Wilson says, "what with being a mother and all" — she's been married to filmmaker Cameron Crowe since 1986 and they have twin boys born in 2000 — "but we just used our time wisely."

She first worked on the lyrics and "guitar ideas" with bassist and bandmate Craig Bartock.

"Craig is a whiz at bringing it all together," she says. "We then brought Ann in and [producer] Ben Mink, who gave us some really cool ideas. He can make acoustic rock sound harder than electric.

"This is a true Heart album," she says of the 10 tracks. "You get the whole arc of personal stuff with the extreme rock stuff. There is not an inauthentic, fictitious bone in the body of this album.

"We've been under the radar the past few summers. We've gone out with Journey a couple of times, [but this tour] is our own thing, and getting to Foxwoods is very important for us."

After they emerged in 1976, the Wilson sisters were considered the first ladies of arena shows, a Seattle-based garage band that flourished with songs like "Crazy on You," "Magic Man" and "Barracuda."

Then, "the hair band thing and the Seattle grunge thing ended" and they went away "with our tails stuck between our legs."

Heart almost stopped beating. Their music had become more pop, even folksy. "I really thought this was it." Then came the transfusion of hard rock that got them rolling again in the mid-'80s. Now, they're hoping to ride "Red Velvet Car" to the top of the charts once again.

"We've outlived the average rock band a couple of times over," says Nancy Wilson, 56. "We're not a hair band anymore. We're now a heritage band who can actually sing and play.

"Acoustic is way harder than any electric guitar can do. But we do it. And we do it well. I really feel the fans are going to love what's on ‘Red Velvet Car.' We're excited about taking it on tour."

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Vinyl 95.3: New Ann Interview

Listen to a nice radio interview with Ann, who is on the road in Canada :D

Pure Heart: Nancy Interview and Podcast

Click here to listen to the nearly 20 minute London Free Press podcast. GREAT Nancy interview. She is so full of life and so brilliant. I really enjoyed this ^_^


Heart’s Wilson sisters and their classy Red Velvet Car are nicely draped in Mink these days — Ben Mink, that is.

The Canadian producer teams with rock and roll’s dynamic duo, singer Ann Wilson and guitarist Nancy Wilson, and their bandmates on their new album Red Velvet Car (Eagle Rock). The tour supporting Red Velvet Car brings Heart to Harris Park this week for the seventh edition of Rock the Park.

“That is the Ben Mink effect,” Nancy Wilson said from Los Angeles recently, after hearing praise for the superb guitar textures and drives on Red Velvet Car. “He and his engineer-mixer David Leonard famously get incredible guitar sounds.”

Playing London for the first time in decades, Heart is on Saturday night’s bill with Lynyrd Skynyrd. The Southern U.S. rock band has not played London before, concert organizers say.

U.S. rock bands 3 Doors Down and Collective Soul top Thursday’s bill. Fest veteran Alice Cooper returns on Friday, when he’s joined by Peter Frampton and other performers.

Mink isn’t a member of Heart. He can be heard with Heart, along with U.S. roots music superstar Alison Krauss, as a guest on a DVD set for release as a complement to the Aug. 31-dropping Red Velvet Car.

Mink had worked with Ann Wilson on a solo project. He also checked out Heart and found a way to bring the rockers full-circle to a new take on their classic sound from the 1970s.

“When he imprinted our band, he saw that, he saw the same thing that we started out being, that acoustic nucleus inside a rock format, with — of course —Ann’s voice, which is signature,” Nancy Wilson said. “He went all the way there with that aspect of our sound which we thought was pretty genius.”

That genius plays out on Red Velvet Car with an assortment of strings including guitar, mandolin, dobro, banjo, fiddle, viola, cello and autoharp, all played by Nancy Wilson and Grammy-winning Mink.

Using B.C. as a base at first, Ann Wilson and her younger sister, Nancy, blasted off during the 1970s with songs such as Crazy On You, Magic Man and Barracuda.

Heart’s hits continued into the 1980s and into the 1990s with These Dreams, Alone, What About Love, If Looks Could Kill and Never among the 21 Top 40 markers for the band. Heart has sold more than 30 million records.

Mink is helping them sell more. Born in the U.S., but a Canadian since the late 1960s, Mink has worked with k.d. lang, Rush, Barenaked Ladies and others — all the way back to Murray McLauchlan’s Silver Tractors.

It’s another Canadian with a similar last name — Sarah McLachlan — who has been a key Heart ally as the band tours this summer with McLachlan’s Lilith Fair.

“Sarah McLachlan is one of the coolest influences on the culture, not just women’s culture, but the culture of human rights and awareness. We’re there for her,” Nancy Wilson said. Wilson said that Lilith Fair’s cancellation of some dates have made it a target for media attention, even though other tours are also dropping dates.

“There’s a negative spin on it. It’s easy to pick on the women,” Nancy Wilson said.

Rock and roll’s most famous sister act are ready to drive right through such spin. It helps to have such a strong vehicle in Red Velvet Car, the first new studio album in six years for Heart.

Nine of the album’s songs were written for the album. The closing track, Sand, is a beautiful new version of a song originally written and recorded by the Lovemongers, the sisters’ 1990’s acoustic side project.

Other standouts include Queen City, “a love letter” to Seattle music.

“It’s like the Liverpool of America in many ways,” Nancy Wilson said. “It’s a seaport town with big music talent. They’ve had a lot of people coming from there from Ray Charles to Jimi Hendrix, the Wailers, the Sonics … the grunge era was another wave of that.”

The strongest track is WTF, which translates as just what you expect when Ann Wilson is shouting it out. It combines wisdom from journals kept by the sisters’ late mother, Lois “Lou” Wilson, with a crunching riff from Heart guitarist Craig Bartock.

“That’s just one of the big rockers. We have a variety of grapes in our vineyard. We put out varietals (a wine term) as our songs, “ Nancy Wilson said. “That’s definitely the ‘hard rock variety’ song.”

After getting the full Mink customizing, WTF beats away as strongly as only Heart can.

“I think it sounds so extremely Heart as well, especially the pre-’80s version of Heart, the original sound of Heart, which could be really heavy rock with the acoustic rocking as hard as any electric in the sound,” she said. “That’s a little different from most rock and roll.”

IF YOU GO

What: Rock the Park 2010, an outdoor rock festival in downtown London. Like the first six editions of Rock the Park, this summer’s concert series is a fundraiser for Bethanys Hope Foundation. It helps pay for London- and UWO-based research into metachromatic leukodystrophy (MLD, a devastating progressive neurodegenerative disease). The London foundation is named for Bethany Catherine McIntyre, who died in 2000, at the age of seven after a five-year struggle with MLD. London concert producer Brad Jones, a former foundation board member, suggested using rock concerts to raise money.

When: Thursday, Friday, gates open at 4 p.m., Saturday, gates open at 3:30 p.m.

Where: Harris Park

Lineups

Thursday: 3 Doors Down, Collective Soul, Thornley, Crash Karma

Friday: Alice Cooper, Peter Frampton, Alannah Myles, Night Ranger

Saturday: Lynyrd Skynyrd, Heart, April Wine, Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels


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Heart to Heart: An Interview With Nancy Wilson

Almost 35 years after the release of their classic debut album Dreamboat Annie, the Wilson sisters (Ann and Nancy) of Heart show no signs of slowing down. Their new album Red Velvet Car (Legacy), follows not only their previous studio recording, 2004’s Jupiter’s Darling, but also Ann’s first ever solo release, 2007’s Hope & Glory (on which she performed duets with Rufus Wainwright and Sir Elton John, among others). The good news is that the timeless Red Velvet Car has everything Heart fans have come to expect from the band, including razor sharp rockers and mellow acoustic tracks. I spoke with Nancy shortly before the release of the disc.


Gregg Shapiro: Red Velvet Car is the first new Heart album since Jupiter’s Darling. How would you say that your songwriting with sister Ann has evolved in the years between discs?

Nancy Wilson: This time out, we’d done a whole lot of touring in between which has galvanized our singing and playing live together on live stages. That always sharpens your focus as a writer when you have the various thrills of songs on a live stage. You want to pull that into the aspect of writing new songs. There’s stuff about playing live that’s melded into the writing, as well as the fact that we romanced our producer Ben Mink for a couple of years before we could get into a studio with him. We also co-wrote some stuff with him for Red Velvet Car, as well as Craig Bartok, with whom we wrote everything for Jupiter’s Darling. Instead of self-producing this album, having this producer (Mink) and having the Ben Mink style involved with our songwriting style, as well as Ben’s songwriting and playing style was exactly what we were trying to get to. And it really worked (laughs). Our instincts were spot on and we achieved what we wanted to get.

GS: It’s great when that happens.

NW: It doesn’t always happen. And in this case, I’m just really excited about this one. It’s always fun to have new material out there. In the case of Red Velvet Car, it’s sort of a topper. One of those things that comes along that you feel represents the arc of your career in the way that you want it to.

GS: The Red Velvet Car disc has a nice balance of acoustic and electric tunes. Do you have a preference for one over the other?

NW: No. That’s the thing about Heart. We’ve always been a dualistic dichotomy of a band (laughs). We rock really hard and half the people used to say, “Why can’t you just rock and get rid of all of those sappy ballads?” And the other half of the people would say, “Why do you have to do those rock songs? Why can’t you stick with your strengths, which is those beautiful, romantic side (laughs)?” We just wouldn’t be Heart without both.

GS: I love the pumping beat of “Wheels.” Are there any plans for a club mix for your gay fans?

NW: Well, “Wheels” would be ridiculously fun to remix (laughs). I think it just goes without saying that that is going to happen because it’s one of those songs. That bass-line something that I had sitting around in my back-pocket and it finally found a perfect home. It’s so dance!
GS: It reminds me a little bit of the Heart tune “Straight On.”

NW: Yeah! Sort of barrelhouse. A little bit of Elton John in there, too.

GS: Speaking of gay fans, I was thinking about the song “Little Queen” and the song “Queen City” had me wondering if you were aware of a following in the gay community?

NW: We’ve always had a gay following that we’re really close with. Initially, because Ann’s a diva (laughs). Just starting out with that fact, it’s automatic that we have gay boy and gay girl fans. There’s the diva thing that a lot of hetero males have a hard time getting behind, it’s so powerful. I think our gay audience is one of our biggest audiences.

GS: It’s been said that being impersonated by a drag queen is one of the highest forms of flattery. Have you come across any doing Heart during your career?

NW: I haven’t seen it myself, but I know they’re there. And there are some really great ones. I would imagine that of all of the many singers to imitate, [Ann] would be one of the hardest. Even though there’s a lot of range represented in singers like Streisand and other high range singers, there’s more of a rock thing that’s harder to achieve, I think (laughs). I’d love to see somebody nail the Ann Wilson thing.
GS: Heart is performing at the newly revived Lilith Fair this summer. What does that mean to you?

NW: I think it’s going to be amazing. We’ve never done Lilith Fair. I’m really curious to see how is the human democracy going to balance out with so many women doing most of the work. I don’t how many guys are going to be in the bands that are playing. It’s going to be totally cool to check it out. And I’m just so proud that we could be an influence for so many women just to get out there and be ready to rock.
Heart will be performing on August 1 in Baltimore at Pier Six Concert Pavilion.


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