Sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson and their Rock Hall of Fame band Heart were in the midst of their biggest tour in years when everything suddenly came crashing to a halt in May 2024.
Singer Ann Wilson was diagnosed with a cancerous growth and left the tour for surgery and preventive chemotherapy. The tour, which would have continued from August through December 2024, was put on hold.
Now, Heart is back, guitarist-singer Nancy Wilson says, with makeup dates for most of those shows including a concert at Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles on Monday, March 3.
“Ann’s doing great,” Nancy Wilson said on a recent video call from her home in Northern California. “She sounds good, she looks good, she feels good, best of all. And she’s pretty bored. She really wants to get out there.
“I can say we’re kind of itching to do it, because it’s what we know how to do,” Wilson says. “I always joke around. I say, you know, I could stay home and do something else, but I have no other skills.
“I mean, I could probably figure something out eventually,” she says. “I’m pretty good at a lot of stuff. But I’m destined to do the rock job, and this is where I work.”
With the delay, the Royal Flush Tour now coincides with the 50th anniversary of Heart’s 1975 debut album, “Dreamboat Annie,” which includes the fan favorites “Magic Man,” “Crazy On You,” and its title track. There may be a few other changes too, Wilson said about a week or so before the band played a pair of Las Vegas shows before hitting Los Angeles.
“We’re still kind of dreaming it all up,” Wilson says. “Going into rehearsal this coming week. So I’m back on the rock job. I’ve got six bags packed: For the bus, for the hotel room, for the backstage area, for the wardrobe case and for the wellness room where we do the workout stuff.
“I’ve got all my bags to send ahead to Las Vegas, then get on the bus and roll, roll out for the year, basically.”
In an interview edited for length and clarity, Nancy Wilson talked about making “Dreamboat Annie,” about Heart’s long practice of performing Led Zeppelin songs and about how she and Ann have kept Heart together through good times and bad.
Q: It must have been fun on the road last year in April and May before things shut down.
A: We were just getting our momentum, you know? Like when you get a big tour, you rehearse and you get ready, and then you’re kind of really nervous at the beginning, because you think you’re going to screw something up. ‘Maybe I’ll make a mistake. Oh (bleep) I made a mistake.’ Because we play completely live, we don’t have pre-records, so we really have skin in the game when we’re on stage.
So we were just getting our roll going, and the shows were starting to get more and more exceptionally fun. And kind of hair-raisingly thrilling, because those are big places, arenas and theaters. It’s only going to happen that one time, live on a stage like that, so the moments are really precious and larger than life.
We were crestfallen, you know. Ann was really a trooper, as always, a super trooper. She had to do a bunch of treatments and a whole bunch of doctor and hospital stuff. And she survived it. She’s back on her feet. She’s feeling great. So three cheers for modern science, what it allows us these days, the healing you can get.
Q: I realized the delay sets you up now for the 50th anniversary of ‘Dreamboat Annie.’
A: It is a really beautiful marker, you know, a historic sort of moment for us. We’re learning some of the other songs from ‘Dreamboat Annie’ that we haven’t really pulled out for a long time, and we’re going to do more songs from it.
Q: ‘Dreamboat Annie’ put Heart on the map from the very start of the band’s career. What do you remember about recording it and the reception that followed?
A: At the time, I joined what then was Ann’s band. They were just barely called Heart. I went to college for a year and a half before I joined her band. I kind of resisted at first, and then I finally joined in. We were, they were, about to make the album, and we’d been writing already. So went into this studio called Can-Base in Vancouver, where Ann was living with ‘the magic man’ at the time. [She laughs. ‘Magic Man’ is about Mike Fisher, Ann Wilson’s bandmate and boyfriend at the time.]
It was like this huge, important, real recording studio with good microphones and isolation booths and a big drum room. Years later, when we revisited the place, it was this tiny little kind of hole in the wall where we made that album, but they had really great gear. Tube gear in the control room, like the compressors, a tube board, and all the great analog gear that people are collecting nowadays.
But it sounded so good, that album, for that reason. We were so nervous and so intimidated and excited, and we made a really cool album. Made it a concept album with recurring motifs and all kind of stuff.
Q: And when it came out and took off?
A: I think it hit a chord. A song like ‘Crazy On You,’ the energy of that still is fun. It’s fun to play today. When we first heard ‘Crazy On You’ on the radio in the car, we flipped and we had to pull over. Like, ‘We did it! We have to pull over and freak.’ Because it was happening. It was just like in a couple of different movies where you’ve seen the band go running: ‘It’s on the radio!’ It’s exactly that scene in real life.
And 50 years later, it’s still a great song. My theory on all that is that great songs are what it’s really all about. People, if there’s a band where you love that song, it was a soundtrack to your life, and you’d go see the band, even if there are almost no original members left. It’s all for the song. You can’t keep a good song down. It really exists in a place bigger than all of us.
Q: I saw on your setlists for last year that you were covering a couple of Led Zeppelin songs, which I think you usually do.
A: We always do. We have to decide what Led Zeppelin songs not to do. Like, OK, how many can we get away with? We used to be called Little Led Zeppelin in Vancouver because we did a lot of Zeppelin songs. Right now we’re re-learning ‘The Rain Song,’ which is a great Zeppelin song.
I heard the movie, the Zeppelin movie is out. It’s supposed to be great.
Q: There is something about their music. At the FireAid benefit, Pink played a Led Zeppelin song and the Black Crowes with Slash did a Zeppelin song.
A: ‘Going To California,’ yeah? It was great. Those songs are deathless and pretty timeless. Especially nowadays when you just don’t find very many rock bands out there anymore. Rock is kind of at a low ebb. I don’t think it ever dies, per se. There’s just an intermission right now or something. But it never dies because it’s the spark.
The imperfections of rock are kind of what makes it. The character of rock is human and not quite so perfect like a lot of pop music tends to get. There’s flaws, beautiful flaws. We like flaws.
Q: Flaws are good. Flaws make it unique.
A: Like when I made a mistake live before we had to stop the tour. I made a really bad intro to ‘Crazy On You’ because the strings were different and something had changed. It was really like my fingers tripped all over each other and I got it totally wrong. But people were like, ‘That was so cool when you made that mistake!’ It’s like, wow, that tells you a lot about the culture right now, like seeing proof that it’s really, right? It’s pretty cool.
Q: People remember those little unique moments.
A: Human moments.
Q: I want to ask you about keeping the band together for this long, which very few bands can do.
A: I think me and Ann, we represent what Heart is. The perception of Heart is the two of us. If we were still trying to be the original lineup, we would never still be there, you know what I mean? There was a lot of drama, and a lot of just growing up to do since the beginning of Heart, as far as who was in the band and who came through the band and all the different players.
I think our relationship has always been really unique. We’re sisters, so we’re blood. Our love is blood love and as different as we are, which we really are. And as crazy and divergent as our lives could be from each other, and the circumstantial stuff from the outside and all the static that happens around us, we just plow through.
I always felt lucky to have another girl, not to mention a sister, inside of Heart. It’s like being in the eye of the hurricane, the way it’s felt over the years, because all the eras go by and the dramas go through, and there’s cows flying around and tractors in the air, but at the nucleus of the story is the quiet center where me and Ann exist.
We had our own lives and our husbands and our own choices and roads we took. But [the band] is kind of like coming back to the good old oak tree called Heart. It exists there. The roots are deep and it’s bigger than all the rest of it, because the music and the songs are there in the culture. It’s a lovely, steady pillar of power that just exists on its own. Even without me and Ann, it’ll still be there.
Q: I suspect Heart draws a multi-generational audience from original fans to much younger ones.
A: Now there’s more people showing up that are in their college age or even teenagers. I get fan mail from teenagers now. I kind of run the fan club and I like to answer fan mail. It’s because I like to take the temperature of who they are, and that’s one of the things that’s really exciting. And there’s little girls that are like nine that want to pose with a guitar with their pink skirts on.
It’s really cool that little girls and little boys are excited by Heart because they come and see us and they’re kind of like, ‘Whoa, it’s not like TV.’ The energy is different from something that’s been kind of force-fed by the culture to them. We’ve always been different, but I think we remain really kind of an anomaly in pop culture.
Q: Like you said, there are fewer rock bands and a ton of pop.
A: Pop’s great. I love a lot of these pop songs. I’m a Taylor Swift fan.
Q: Did you see Taylor Swift when she was on tour?
A: I couldn’t do it. I wanted to in a big way, but I saw so much footage from all the girls I know that did go. During the pandemic, [Swift’s ‘Folklore’] was my pandemic album. I think it’s my favorite album of hers.
Q: Touring has surely gotten more comfortable since the mid-’70s. What’s it like for you today?
A: Oh, god. [She laughs] Unless you’re at the private jet level – we’re on the bus level – the inconveniences almost outweigh the reward of getting up on a stage for two hours. It’s like everything is aimed for those two hours. The bad pizza, the no sleep, the potholes, overnight in the bus, trying to sleep. You can’t even watch TV half the time because it’s bad reception.
All the scheduling of it. Trying to see your family when you’re home between their school breaks. It’s just a lot of moving parts that you have to be good at. It’s an obstacle course, basically, and you just have to run with your suitcase and get to the stage.
Q: But those two hours on stage?
A: It’s everything my whole life is aimed to be able to do well, or at least as well as possible. People are there. They’re loving you and they love those songs. And it’s a moment that only happens that one time, so you can’t just rewind it, rewatch it.
It’s beautiful, sort of like a mindfulness that happens on stage. You really have to be in the moment. You can’t be thinking, ‘Well, I think I’ll do my laundry later in the sink on the bus or in the hotel room.’ Because then you’re like, ‘Wait, what’s the next chord? I was thinking about my laundry.’
There’s just certainly magic that is transferred in that setting.