It was December 2012, and Heart was on the road when they got the unexpected call. The offer? To perform as a surprise guest at the Kennedy Center to honor their rock and roll heroes, Led Zeppelin. No pressure, right? It would be a quick stopover—with giant ripple effects. “We didn’t have more than one rehearsal before the actual day when the show happened,” Heart’s vibrant lead guitarist, Nancy Wilson, tells American Songwriter. During that practice, the chill had set into her bones. Nancy remembers that it was “snow cold” in winter and that their sole rehearsal “didn’t go well for me because my hands were frozen.” The song the band was set to play was “Stairway to Heaven,” perhaps the most iconic rock song of all time for perhaps the most iconic rock band in history. What could go wrong?
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But with her hands freezing, the producers gave Nancy an offer. Backing musicians could play along with her as she plucked her acoustic so that if she slipped up or her hands didn’t respond, there would be support. But Nancy declined, wanting to do the deed all herself. “There’s this old stage superstition,” she says. “When the soundcheck goes really bad, you know the show will be great. In this case, it really worked out well for me.” The night of the show, Nancy was warmed up backstage. Ready. She locked eyes with her sister Ann, the band’s lightning bolt lead vocalist, and together they took a deep breath. Then they exhaled, like, Here we go! And the duo walked out onto the stage. “It was really an electric room,” remembers Nancy, “with just extraordinary dignitaries there.”
“It was really quite exciting and nerve-wracking,” says Ann. “There were so many incredible people at that show. The audience was just luminaries everywhere you looked. My sister and I tried really hard to just be calm and wait to have nerves until after we were done with our part.”
Indeed, President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle were in the stands—and both Ann and Nancy had met them prior to the performance, shaking hands. Led Zeppelin’s three living members—Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones—were there, too, seated above in a balcony. As were other music and cultural legends. But the result was incandescent. Pitch perfect. Poignant. “You think of an adjective like ‘home,’” Nancy says. The performance, which also included Jason Bonham (the son of the late Led Zeppelin drummer John Bonham) on the drum kit and a full choir, brought the three living Led Zeppelin members to exultation (and some to tears), which is no small feat. “Robert Plant explained later, ‘I dread that song because people always murder it and always get it wrong,’” Nancy says. “But he said, ‘You guys really nailed it. You played it great. You took it there; you brought it home.’ It was really a moment. Now I can die!” she laughs.
For Nancy, it was an “Oh my God, I can’t believe that just happened to me” moment. But it was one well-earned for her and Ann, the trailblazing rockers from the Pacific Northwest. Today, the video from the 2012 Kennedy Center performance boasts over 165 million views on YouTube alone. It also once again cemented Heart’s legendary status as one of the iconic bands in rock music history. But even before that, the sisters knew where they stood thanks to achieving the two most important criteria in music: a lifetime achievement award from the Grammys and hearing their own music in an elevator.
“There were times with me and Ann as working musicians, releasing albums and touring, working our butts off trying to write cool songs,” says Nancy. “And we’d come home after an album maybe didn’t do as well as we wanted, and we’d be like, OK, well, at some point we will know that we were legendary. At some point, there will be something in the culture that rewards you with legendary status.” That was back in the 1990s, around the time that their home city of Seattle was exploding with grunge music. “We didn’t get to feel legendary yet,” Nancy says. But then they got the Grammy nod in 2023 (10 years after being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame) and some elevator music love. “And now the requirements have been satisfied!” she says with a laugh.
Recently, one of the biggest names in popular music, Chappell Roan, covered the Heart song “Barracuda.” For Nancy, that’s especially cool. But what’s also great is seeing young fans embrace her band’s work. “Since about 2015,” she says, “at Heart shows, we’ve really started seeing 20-somethings and college-aged people [in the audience]. It’s exceptionally satisfying when a new generation starts to pick up what you’ve been laying down going on 50 years. Songs become the currency of lifetimes.”
Ann says she can feel the Heart Renaissance happening in real time, too. “It’s fantastic,” she says. “Because you can be the tree that gets cut down in the forest, and nobody notices. That happens, too, sometimes. But it’s so much more wonderful when you’re with people, and they take notice and are excited and happy about it. It makes us happy about it, too.”
It was 1975 when Heart released their debut LP, Dreamboat Annie, which includes songs like “Magic Man” and “Crazy on You.” The album was released by the Canadian indie record label Mushroom Records after Heart had “been turned down multiple times by big American labels,” says Nancy. From there, it was a slow burn. Nancy remembers a Detroit rock station playing songs from it first. Then it got bigger region by region—thanks, in part, to some real elbow grease from the group and a little wheel greasing by management.
“We got in a rental car with our agent guy who took us across country,” Nancy remembers. “We’d go to the radio station in person, and the cute chicks would chat up the programming director at the station, and the DJ guy would be really flattered, and our agent would say, ‘Go wait in the car,’ and we’d go wait in the car. And he’d probably do the payola as we were waiting. But it was strong enough material that it took hold region by region, and still, almost 50 years later, it’s a celebrated piece of work.”
Dreamboat Annie led to more records, including the 1977 offering Little Queen, which included the sharp-tongued “Barracuda” as its opening number. The albums were the result of a great deal of work from the sisters, and since then, they’ve sold more than 50 million of them. “Ann and I were just aimed like pistols with dogged determination to be on stages and to write songs and record albums,” says Nancy. “There was never another B-plan. We were compelled.” She adds, “But we were pretty proficient when we started out. We did the homework. We spent thousands of hours jamming in bedrooms and little rehearsal spaces—we just had to do it, and somehow that worked out pretty well for us.”
Of course, that dogged determination has never died. More recently, after some well-publicized and unfortunate internal family drama between the sisters, which kept them apart for some years, both Ann and Nancy put out solo work. (Though Ann says it was not a “big, huge falling out,” rather it was more of a disagreement “on a couple” things.) That solo material satisfied them as artists. But it never quite offered them the je ne sais quoi that being in Heart together did. “Ultimately,” says Nancy, “being sisters and being together, we came to realize that the two of us together is what actually defines what Heart is. That’s where the magic happens. It’s really, what is our life’s work?” To be on stage together, says Nancy, offers a “dangerous, edgy feeling.”
Throughout the history of rock music, there have been many successful buzzy bands to make their marks. But when family groups come together, that’s something much more unique. It’s something Heart benefits from in spades, too. “I think it’s DNA,” says Nancy, trying to explain it. That, of course, still provides its own numinous, hard-to-pinpoint quality. But Nancy gives it a try, saying, “Your cells have memory. So, when you start singing songs with your family as a little kid, we had that ingrained, embedded in our DNA before we even saw the Beatles and wanted to be a rock band.”
Ann and Nancy, who grew up listening to music from opera to Ray Charles and Judy Garland, remember family reunion jams around campfires by the ocean early in their lives where people would be singing and playing ukulele, singing old traditional Irish pub songs like “The Great Ship Titanic.” Heart even performed that song while recording an episode for Prairie Home Companion in 2014 at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles. In a way, that’s where the appeal of Heart was born. Way before anyone had any idea what would come years later. Ann attributes their chemistry to “the family bond” and “the family blend.”
For Heart, which started in 1973 in Vancouver, British Columbia, but came to include the Wilson sisters in 1975, the band’s legacy is one of both rock prowess and trailblazing success. As rock music was becoming en vogue in the 1950s and 1960s, few women were at the forefront. Even now, the genre is male-dominated. However, young women who need a role model can easily spot Heart and take from their example. The group almost included a third Wilson sister, Lynn, who is eight years older than Nancy and four years older than Ann. But Lynn, says Nancy, started her family at the young age of 18. Later, though, she became the band’s “wardrobe girl” and traveled extensively with Heart on their tours. She even sang on a lot of the albums. “She loved having her family,” says Nancy. “But she also regretted not having [the band life].”
Looking back on her own life, Nancy says she’s proud of the music and her band’s career. But perhaps even more so, she’s proud of the example she’s set as a human being over the years. She says she sometimes thinks of people at a bar talking about her over a beer or glass of wine, and she imagines what they might say. But she’s comforted by the fact that it’s likely a matter of how kind she was at her core despite her fame and fortune. That she was positive and, well, heartfelt. A lot of people, Nancy says, are power or attention-hungry and will stoop to negative places to attain either. But that was never her or her sister’s modus operandi.
“The high road is the harder road to live,” she says. “So, being a decent person and a giver, somebody who gives back to people takes care of people, loves her fellow humans, and plays well with others—I think that’s really important. And I feel like I’ve made it a real, almost excessive point of trying to be that person in my lifetime.”
This year, beginning February 28 and extending for several months, Heart will hit the road. The new tour, which will feature Heart songs as well as solo tunes from both Ann and Nancy, comes after Ann had to pause the past one to deal with a cancer diagnosis. But now, Ann says she is “feeling great!” adding, “My health is doing cool—I’m clear. It’s very wonderful. I’m feeling like myself.” Nancy says she “can’t wait to get on big stages with Ann [to play some] strong, muscular rock and roll.” For Nancy, her bond with music is akin to an intertwined loving relationship. “It asks a lot of you,” she says. “To bear your soul, to be honest with your truth, to bring your truth out of you.” If you’re lucky, though, she says, the music also keeps you honest. “It becomes your soulmate,” Nancy says.
“It has a great amount of emotional substance,” echoes Ann, speaking about the group’s sound. “It’s not just throw-away music. It says something—the songs have a message, and they have an emotional message. That’s what I like about it. They’re sort of timeless.”
Photo by Criss Cain
