Written by In 2012, Heart presented their fifteenth studio album, Fanatic, at a show at New York’s iconic Beacon Theatre. After the show, Classic Rock were granted an audience with Ann and Nancy Wilson, a discussion that took in the new album, love, sobriety, politics and the changing face of the band.
“Everybody in? Yes? Good.”
It’s October, and Classic Rock is jammed into a tiny lift backstage at New York City’s Beacon Theatre. And with those words, we begin our ascent. We’ve just witnessed Heart deliver a blinding show to a rapturous audience, and now a coterie of record company types, bigwigs from publishing house Harper Collins, random friends and well-wishers are being shuttled up several stories to say hello to Heart. The Art Deco venue is a stunner, but behind the scenes it’s beginning to show its age, and we’re not entirely sure the machinery will take us all the way to the sixth floor.
Thankfully, however, the trip is mercifully short and in a small, unpretentious room, Ann and Nancy Wilson hold court to the assembled throng. It’s crazy scenes in a tiny space, Nancy waves across the room as she and her sister smile and pose for photos, shake hands and make nice. Classic Rock moves aside as John McEnroe and wife Patty Smyth squeeze by and head down the stairs.
The Wilsons are used to scenes like this. They’ve been doing it a long time. “We’ve had a lot of things happening,” smiles Ann Wilson later. ”They’re all sort of intertwined and we’re doing shows at the same time, so it’s been very busy.”
Busy? Ever the lady of understatement, 2012 has been an incredible one for the Seattle band. In fact, in terms of eventful happenings, it’s probably one of the most intense times in Heart’s four-decade career.
So let’s just define “busy” for a moment. Ann and Nancy were speakers at Austin’s SXSW in early March; in June, they released Strange Euphoria, a personally curated, career-spanning box set, stuffed with demos, live recordings and other rarities alongside their monster hits; the sisters published their autobiography in September, the same month they were bestowed a star on the Hollywood Walk Of Fame. We’re not finished yet.
A new studio album, Fanatic, was released in October, and they were nominated again (for the second year in a row) for induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame alongside Rush and Deep Purple.
Oh, and in between all that, the six-piece has spent most of its time traversing the US playing show after show. They’re even sticking an extra day on this brief New York stopover to make a last-minute appearance at Radio City Music Hall at Paul Simon’s Children’s Benefit Concert, joining a roster that includes Simon, Sting, Stevie Wonder, Aaron Neville, Amy Grant and presenters Oprah, Tom Hanks, Hillary Clinton and Spike Lee.
Looking at that schedule, you might think that it was a carefully timed media plan, making hay while the sun is shining. Get Heart in everyone’s faces. A Heart attack, if you will. But if it was, Wilson’s not buying it.
“I don’t know if you could say there’s a reason,” says Ann, simply. “Just the new album was ready, the book was done, the box set was done… All those projects wrapped up at the same time. There was no real human way we could have made that happen on purpose. It was a culmination of a lot of things. And we have this tour so we’re very lucky this year. But we’re tired, y’know?”
If Heart are tired, they’re not showing it. Especially not tonight. It’s a different experience seeing them play on their home turf rather than on one of their sporadic visits to the UK – something which is “in our plan for 2013, definitely,” says Ann. In the US, they’re conquering heroes, blasting through songs that have soundtracked their crowd’s lives – from the 70s hits (Barracuda, Crazy On You, Magic Man, Heartless) to the glossy 80s anthems (What About Love, These Dreams, Alone) through to today’s more rootsy, but no less vital material.
The audience goes nuts at every note, and the fervour isn’t only for the old stuff. Fanatic is the new baby and may have only reached the shop shelves today, but songs have been previewed online and Heart have been playing them round the country for a while already.
The Heart of 2012 – that’s the Wilsons, guitarist Craig Bartock, drummer Ben Smith, bassist Dan Rothchild and Debbie Shair on keyboards – is a powerful force on stage, as Ann acknowledges.
“There are different eras and the band has played different ways in different times with different line-ups,” she says. “The line-up we have now – we have a new bass player in Dan – but everyone else has been together for at least 10 years, and it is without a doubt the finest line-up because we really, really know each other.
“When we go up there on stage together the six of us are after something. I’d almost liken it to a sexual experience. When you are with someone and you both know that you’re trying to reach some kind of summit. That’s what we do when we go out there, we’re trying to access something to touch that spark.”
Tonight they succeed.
When the band released their last album Red Velvet Car in 2010, six years had elapsed since their previous studio outing, and the studio hiatus before that was a whopping 11 years between 1993’s Desire Walks On and Jupiter’s Darling. Not since the heady world chart-dominating run of Heart and Bad Animals (in 1985 and ’87 respectively) have the Wilsons released albums in such quick succession.
“We have a really great relationship with Ben Mink, our producer,” says Ann to explain the speed with which Fanatic arrived. “After I did Hope And Glory [Wilson’s 2007 solo album] with him, I said to Nancy that we have to work with him for Heart. The three of us worked together and we liked it so much we just turned around and wanted to do it again. It’s as simple as that.”
Or, as younger sister Nancy puts it: “When you’re pushing 60, you know what you want and you go for it. You’re not going to test it out for five or 10 years, you’re going to get in the car and drive.”
Fanatic is a very different prospect to that of Red Velvet Car, the first release Heart collaborated on with Mink. The latter relied heavily on acoustic guitars and despite some intense moments was a far more reflective set of songs. To use an old Heart analogy, Fanatic, however, is more the dog to Red Velvet Car’s butterfly.
“Fanatic is a lot edgier,” says Ann. “I’d say from the inside out, it’s a lot more focused. The songs were just coming thick and fast and we were in such a creative state. We had so much to say. We weren’t sitting around thinking, ‘Oh, let’s see, what shall we write about now?’”
We’ve always been a little schizophrenic,” admitted Nancy earlier in the year. “We do really soft, we do really hard, we do the stylistic stuff in between.”
If anything, it’s this schizophrenia that appeals the most with Heart. Their core audience is never entirely sure which Heart they’re going to get, and that’s what’s given the band their longevity.
“I think it all goes to attention span,” says Ann. “How much attention span can the audience handle? Will they follow you through a bunch of changes?”
While not a political diatribe, Fanatic is a very observational album, offering commentary on problems facing the US, and by extension, the rest of the west. Dear Old America is a departure from the band’s signature themes of more traditional affairs of the heart (pun intended), and tackles the thorny issue of bringing the troops home from overseas conflict.
“That song really comes from inside the Wilson family,” says Ann. “Our father was a military man – he fought in Korea and World War II, and he was injured really badly a couple of times. He brought home a pretty clear PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder] situation into our family with him. You could call our family a microcosm for the American military family, and with everyone beginning to come back from Afghanistan and Iraq soon, this is starting to be addressed here now.
“The song is just saying, ‘Let’s look at this, we’re bringing people home now and they don’t come home easy.’ It’s hard to bring a soul that’s seen all the things they’ve seen. It’s going to be a struggle and we’ve got to welcome them back.
“We were out and about all year while it was being written and touring and travelling around and seeing things,” she continues. “I was watching TV, I was online. I was just plugged in. Y’know, not sitting back in an easy chair going, ‘Oh, let everyone else think about it.’ I guess by the time everything was written and the album was made I felt like I’d been struck by lightning, like I was poured out.”
There’s another reason Wilson has been enjoying a new burst of creativity. Sober now for almost three years, she explains putting a stop on the booze has been revelatory. “I was having so much trouble writing songs and just coming up with ideas when I was still drinking.”
Faced with health issues, quitting the bottle was a turning point for the singer. And a good one.
“I never went to a 12-step meeting or into treatment. But I did get support from friends, family and bandmates who had gone that route, so I knew the language,” Wilson says in her autobiography. “I’m still cautious. I call ahead before a tour, and have the hotel minibar emptied before I get there. There’s always alcohol backstage at any rock show, but it’s not in my dressing room and not on my tour bus. I didn’t get sober for everyone else; I did it for myself. In that way, the very stubbornness that stopped me from looking at my issues for so long has helped me. I know some around me thought I would fail, but I am stubborn enough to want to prove them wrong.”
This stubbornness is evident in Fanatic. With this new album, coupled with the show that Classic Rock witnessed earlier, there’s a definite sense of Heart wanting to re-establish themselves as a kick-ass rock band. For long-time fans, a bugbear has always been that they’ve often been dismissed as ‘that ballad band’, where the truth is that they’ve always had that duality to them. Ann, however, is not so sure that people need reminding, more that Fanatic’s sound is a reflection of the wider world.
“I think its electric quality really has to do with the electric quality of the world situation,” she says. “There’s a strong current of energy and edginess going on right now. It’s dangerous times. But so’s life. And you don’t want to sit on the sidelines.”
As well as the Heart-related events in the sisters’ lives this year, there was another personal issue that loomed large in the making and writing of Fanatic. In May, guitarist Nancy married her new fella, Geoff Bywater.
“Nancy is a great believer in love as a panacea for all problems,” laughs Ann. “She’ll say that a lot. And we all go, ‘Yeah, you know Nancy, she’s a love monger.’ But then last year she met and fell in love with a man. She fell so head-over-heels that everyone was surprised. So that’s where the title song got its beginnings. It starts out being about romantic love and it raises up to be a world of love. Nancy is a love fanatic…”
And is Ann the same?
“Yes, I am too,” she laughs. “I haven’t been as successful in relationships as Nancy, but I’m more of a world-view lover, I’m taking the global perspective!”
After the fallow, primarily off-the radar years of the late 90s and the early noughties, it seems that Heart have got their groove back and are finally reaping their just rewards.
When Classic Rock catches up with Ann a month or so after the New York show for a follow-up chat, Heart are still on the road. Literally. “Parked on a side street in Knoxville, Tennessee,” in fact. There’s plenty more dates on the schedule.
“I’m looking forward to getting home and having some time off now,” she admits. “This year has been a big one. Everything colliding at once has been something of a lucky accident. That’s how I feel about it, as each one of those projects had a life of its own and there was no way we could put them on time schedules really. If you can call only getting maybe a month off the road in a whole year luck, then we’ve been real lucky!”
This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock Presents AOR 7, published in December 2012.
