March 19, 2024 • 38 mins
Since their debut album in 1975, the band Heart has been unstoppable. With sisters Ann Wilson on lead vocals and Nancy Wilson on guitar and vocals, Heart made history as the first female-led hard rock band. They dominated the charts for decades, producing 20 Top 40 hits like “Barracuda,” “Alone,” and “These Dreams,” earning four Grammy nominations and selling over 35 million records. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees also have the honor of being one of the longest-lasting and most commercially successful bands of all time. This April, they are heading out on a world tour. In this two-part episode, host Alec Baldwin speaks with the two women at the beating center of the band, sisters Nancy and Ann Wilson. In this episode, Alec talks with Nancy Wilson about how she got her start on the guitar at the age of 9, how she transitioned into composing film scores and why the guitar is her best friend.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Still Time Studio.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
This is the history making rock band Heart with Crazy
on You. Off their nineteen seventy five album Dreamboat Annie
with Anne on lead vocals and Nancy on guitar, the
Wilson's created a unique mix of rock, pop, and folk
(00:57):
that would earn them twenty top forty singles, four Grammy nominations,
and sell thirty five million records worldwide. Along the way,
Hart went on to become one of the longest lasting
and commercially successful bands of all time. Now they are
(01:18):
reuniting for a world tour next week. I'll speak with
Heart's lead singer Anne Wilson, but first I'll talk with
my guest today, guitarist and vocalist Nancy Wilson. In addition
to her numerous accomplishments with Heart, Nancy Wilson also formed
the band road Case Royale and as a BAFTA winning
(01:41):
film composer. I wanted to know when Nancy and her
sister Anne, both Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners, first started
writing music together.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Well, we had many bands before we had Heart. We
had little bands called the Viewpoint and Rapunzel and acoustic
all girl bands and played at schools and you know,
churches and living a lot of living rooms, and we
started trying to write as soon as we could play guitars,
(02:14):
which was I was about nine or ten when we
started trying to write songs. And they were bad songs,
very bad songs. And then when we actually got a
real band, somebody that had a van, you know, at
a basement and a mom that didn't care, that's when
we started to get real serious about writing better songs,
(02:36):
because at that point we had audiences and clubs and
you know stuff like that, real drums and microphones and
amplifiers and things.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Did someone teach you how to play the guitar? Your
self taught self taught.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I knew a little bit of piano already, musical family,
from the grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, so
everybody knew out of harmonize and play ukulele and some
piano over here. So we came by it, you know, honestly,
to be musicians.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
When did you believe you could play the guitar? When
do you really start to say I think I got this?
I think I can really do this. How old are you.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Well, by the time I've been playing for about six months,
I knew I was.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Going to you're nine and a half. Yeah, nine and
a half. You conquered it when you're nine and a half.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Well, we saw the Beatles play the Ed Sullivan Show
on our black and white grandmother's television in La Jolla, California,
you know, like the lunar landing. It was just the
moment to be struck by that lightning, and the culture
changed it, you know, forever ever since everything the world changed.
(03:49):
And so I knew right then I had to have
a guitar, and I was good at it right away.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Now you're a famous guitar player. When did you get
your hands on your first guitar that you were like,
this is more like it.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Well, it was Anne's guitar that I snuck away from
her because she had a good one that our grandma
gave her when she had mono nucleosis and she was
holed up in bed with our other sister, Lynn, and
they were trying to get well and doing hobbies like
learning how to play guitar. But that was when I
(04:24):
could play, So I would sneak it away and try
to learn how to use a good guitar. But I
figured she had like just a natural gift from above
with her voice, and so with me as the accompanist
and her voice, it was a natural like, hey, kids,
(04:45):
come on downstairs, we're having a party. Do your ethel
Merman imitation, right? So Anne would.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Go, hey, do the ethel Merman as I show. Yeah, so,
and I'd be playing it on a guitar. So we
started out.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Kind of like a little comedy troupe for our friend parents' parties,
and and you know, I guess the rest is history.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
But when you say comedy, you mean that you didn't
have enough songs, you'd learn, you didn't feel confident enough
making it strictly. You wanted to make people laugh and
play music correct.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, it was. It had to be fun obviously when
you're young too, you know it's got to be hysterical
or it's not worthwhile. So we did comedy skits in
the in the garage and plays that we would charge
tickets for and do like dance routines to records that
we've played. We put on little productions and Anne was
(05:45):
always the manager, being the older you know, four years
older sister. So we ham hambones, you know, just performing
somehow or any way we could perform, we would.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
I bet every boy in that neighborhood was there in
your yard. They were lying outside your.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Garage five cents for kool aid, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, popcorn kool aid. Now, when you talk about that
performance inclination, and obviously you're very young at the time,
you never had any thoughts about acting beyond you know,
over the years, how do you ever consider acting acting?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I thought maybe I should try some one time, you know,
so because being a goofball and being a handbone, you know,
you're just like, well, hey, I'm not afraid of, you know,
trying to be goofy in front of people. So at
one point when I was married to a writer director,
so I got to do a part in a movie
(06:40):
you was filming at the time, called say Anything Right.
And I'd already been working on music for the films
that he was doing at the time. But I thought, oh,
you know, I could try to be an actor, I guess,
And so I tried. I failed miserably. It was like
not built to be an actor?
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Really?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Why?
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Why?
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Because I don't know how to inhabit someone else's character,
I guess, but I do end up, like I tried twice.
Another movie I tried to do a bigger speaking part
with called The Wildlife. I was a pregnant cops wife
that answers the dover and the the other girl was
(07:25):
there and I tried to, you know, be real and I've.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Got to go watch this movie The wild Life. So bad.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, so bad.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I love that I do too.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
They're beautifully bad.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Anyway, so I failed miserably, So no acting.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
You cut that short pretty early.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Well, I realized, you know, I meant to be a
musician and I'm not meant to be an actor. But
I do end up having like complete respect. And this
is something I wanted to say to you, as an
amazing actor yourself, how much I really do have, Like
it's incredulous how much work goes into that. Like there's
(08:07):
so much to it to be an actor, being able
to memorize lines and being able to deliver something as
kind of someone else, you know, in a part like that.
I have ultimate respect for the job you do.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Well, No, that's very kind. I mean, for me, it's
always been the motivation has always been, you know, you
just don't think too much about it. When you play
a tough role of the person's what I call the
negative value and the piece, they're very tough, you know.
When you play Hitler, you got to give it everything
you've got. You got to play that role and it's tough.
You know, you don't want to be that person, but
you can't go there. So you just it's like jumping
(08:42):
in the cold water. You just got to go. You
just got to do it not really think about it
very much.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
You have to kind of not think about it.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So you wrote music with Cameron Kevin Crowe. How did
that start? How did you start? It was soundtrack or
score or both?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, No, we had had music, you know, love of
music as friends together forever and so it was kind
of like we got together as a couple. We were
first kind of dating and it was like, Okay, who
do you like? Who do you like? He goes, I
like the guess who? And it's like, ooh, I'm not
sure about the guests who you know, but I kind
(09:20):
of grew to love them kind of thanks to Cavin Crowe.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So we had like music things we would just you know,
just talk and talk and talk about music Elton John.
And you know, Tiny Dancer was a big song for us,
and like we go like, oh, like a puppet cha,
you know, like we'd have our Elton John accent singing
(09:43):
Elton John.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I want to make you sing a lot of songs
now that you open up this can been singing that
for us.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Well, I'm I'm going to practice for a thing I'm
doing with some of Elton John's players at this benefit
for Hillside benefit, like this weekend, so I get to
play with Elton. I'm just a super fan. I'm a shameless,
giddy super fan around all those guys.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Oh my god, Now, when did you start writing songs that?
Actually they're in his films? That begins? When well, that begins?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
I started working on his first film, Say Anything, and
I worked with there was a scoring artist. I worked
with her a little bit in the recording studio to
add a guitar part to the score that they were
already doing for Say Anything. And I was like, I
don't know how to read charts. I'm freaking out because
(10:34):
I didn't know how to read charts. I don't read
I learned how to read music, but I never used it.
So I lost that language along the way because I
just had it all in my head on ear, you know.
I'd do everything by ear. So Anne kind of took
me in and somebody showed me how to read the
chart and how to go D D D, you know,
(10:58):
in a scene and say anything. Was like my first
foray into scoring with other musicians in a scoring studio.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And you did other films with them as well.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, and the next one I did was Jerry Maguire
by myself. So I had a friend's studio and I
I went to Costco. I got a little tiny cassette
TV cassette player like VCR and that's what the dailies
were printed on at the time. He had a good
(11:32):
microphone and a six track reel to reel and so
no soundproofing, nothing, just somebody's house in a spare room
with you know, garbage trucks and dogs barking.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Outside, and you're on the guitar or the piano on
the guitar.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
And keyboards and percussion. I did everything wow, and some
vocal stuff, but it was like it was like, oh,
gotta wait for the garbage truck, you know, to press record.
But I would like I would do the countdown on
tape to the cassette that I put on this TV
that luckily wasn't loud enough to pick up on the microphone,
(12:13):
but it was like so loovi. It was ridiculous. There
was no time I saw the timecode on the cassette
for the scene. I was recording onto with one really
good microphone on a really good guitar in a very
noisy room, and it all worked because the guitar was
close enough. At one point we used a few mics
(12:34):
and spread the guitar sound out like stereo. We filled
up the whole tape with one guitar.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
And when you do this for people who don't know,
you don't wait to watch a cut and the music flows.
You're doing it. Scenes are coming, you cut scenes and
footage and you're writing stuff to that, or you wait
till you get a full cut of the film.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I wrote a lot of stuff to ongoing cuts, like
scenes that were changed later, pieces of scenes that I
would do music for which I would have to redo
later all over again when it was cut together. But
there was still a lot of learning process for me
(13:16):
just to try to cut to picture because normally I
just you know, play music for songwriting, and so it
was an entirely different language to learn for me, how
to stay out of the way of a scene where
there's a dialogue happening and have not to step on
the words, and how to create sort of an atmospheric
(13:40):
like some air around you know. So less is more
in a lot of cases, which is one of the
biggest lessons I learned about scoring music as opposed to
just writing songs for you know, hysterical screaming women kind
of songs.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, could you do almost famous? Well?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I did almost famous. Yeah, I think that was the masterpiece.
Really well.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
He had a great line to me when I worked
with him. We were talking about parenting. I met your
sons and we were hanging out one day, and he
said to me, something led up to one thing led
to another. He goes, well, he is, I try to
have some understanding of my kids, considering that their father
is an Academy Award winning screenwriter and their mother's in
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bit of pressure,
(14:27):
a little bit of pressure.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, you know, there's there's therapy involved, you know, because
I mean, why wouldn't there be, you know, because that's
a lot pressure on little guys and there are two
twin boys that they're really good people. Thank God for that,
because we managed to do something right along the way.
(14:48):
But but you know, being being hard working archest type people,
creatives that it doesn't really allow for just your everyday
average I mean, and I always made a dinner table,
I always lit candles, we always had dinner together.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Hearts Nancy Wilson. If you enjoy conversations with gifted rockers,
be sure to check out my episode with musician Patti Smith.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
I didn't really come into the music business. I wound
up in music by mistake. I'm not really a musician.
I didn't really want to be a musician or a singer.
I wanted to be a poet and a writer. And
it was accidental. So would it accidentally happen now? I
don't think so. I think I would have to be
(15:39):
more focused on what I wanted. But also because I'm
so untechnological, I mean, I'm just not really suited for
right now, so probably I would have to be like
a physicist.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Drove of the band the game. Oh you don't even drive.
Speaker 4 (15:55):
No, I don't know how to drive, so I couldn't
do that.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Hear more of my conversation with Patti Smith that Here's
the Thing dot org. After the break, Nancy Wilson shares
how things have changed for women in the industry since
she started out and how it feels to be one
of the founding women of rock. I'm Alec Baldwin and
(16:30):
you're listening to Here's the Thing wish This is You
and Me, the title track from Nancy Wilson's twenty twenty
one debut solo album, Who Is You and Me? And
(17:01):
Me for decades playing sold out stadiums and recording hit
records was another day on the job for the members
of Heart. I wanted to know how Nancy Wilson felt
about juggling the demands of her music career while raising
her children with then husband director Cameron Crowe.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Well, the scheduling of trying to be together yeah, really challenging.
The idea going in was, okay, if we have kids,
we'll take one project at a time and the other
person stays song. But that's not really how you try.
You try to do that doesn't work out, It doesn't
work as well as you want it to work. Getting
(17:45):
together we made a big point of always, you know,
when we were all together, we would really be together
and not just go and do stuff that was distracting.
We would hang out and almost the favorite story I
have even after we were not married anymore, but I
had the kids at my place. I lived in Topanga
(18:05):
Canyon for a while. There was a big power out,
like there always is in Topanga. The power went out,
and the boys were there and I lit the fire,
lit the candles and had the lanterns. It's like, well,
I could light the stove and I could still make dinner.
So let's tell ghost stories. So you know. So we
(18:26):
had the candles, we had the firelight, and we told stories,
and then we had a story contest and each person
went around and told let's pick categories. So it was
really a great thing when the power went out, because
it was a beautiful life lesson and a learning, you know,
(18:48):
an instructional moment for them as well as for me
as a parent, about taking all the artifice away and
just being together.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Now, questions are going to go hand in hand. One
is some of these female goddesses of music precede you
by a few years, and some of them are you know,
right around you know your time. You're talking about Stevie Nicks,
and then before you, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, Linda
Ronstadt and so forth. For you, was it I mean,
(19:20):
let's face it, your sister and you both during your
heyday were these gorgeous women. And we talked to your
sister about, you know, the difficulties of that, about how
women lived in that world back then. Was it tough
where people it's the word impolite untoward, Yes.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
I mean it was a different era. Men were way
less evolved the pre feminization of men. Yes, but I
think it was just part for the course. And we
didn't really care because we were military brats from the
Marine Corps, like a Marine Corps aristocracy, to be honest.
(19:58):
And so a grand dad was a brigadier general with
four stars, and our uncle and our granddad other granddad
and our dad was a military you know star and
also the conductor of the military band as well. So
and so we had this kind of breviera. I think
(20:20):
we were just burly girls, you know that just didn't
take the guff.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
You're confident, Yeah, we.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Were just confident. We kind of felt like one of
the guys. We didn't have brothers, so guys in bands
were kind of became our brothers, and we were equal,
we felt equal. We wanted democracy, We wanted a democracy
of a band with men. And our influences were not
Janis Choplin. They were Jimmy Page, you know. So our
(20:50):
heroes and our muses were more the rock guys. So
we wanted to be able to kind of transform or
you know, be gender free, you know, not gender specific.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Well, it seems like there's a reality when you're home,
you're treated a certain way with respect, and everything is
much more decent and honest at home. And then when
you go out to the filthy cesspool of rock and
roll music ticket sales, then it's a different thing with
the people are just animals. I mean, they're just they
don't get it. But then when you do that and
(21:26):
you're enduring all those things that they're well, that's obviously
what I've gotten. But what you see now is these
monolithic stars, female stars. The biggest names in music now
are women. It's obviously Taylor Swift and Beyonce, Miley Cyrus.
I mean, all of the biggest acts today are female acts.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Boy genus, boy genius.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
You like, oh yeah, when you see them put together
these I don't want to say bubble or world, but operation.
They got an operation in which they're taken care of.
I think a lot of the crap that women had
to put up with has been subtracted from their lives.
They've set up a system, they've set up an organization
where that doesn't even come into the picture, the way
(22:10):
they're treated, you know.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, well that's a really good point. I mean, I
think that's really true, and I'm really happy things have changed,
really happy about that. I mean, things have evolved in
a really positive direction.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
If you're making money, by the way, and they're.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Making yeah, they're changing the world economy basically too, so
like Taylor Swift, but I'm really glad for that. I'm
really kind of proud in a certain way, amazing to
have been a bit of a founder for some of
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yes, but also let me just say this, which is
you pioneer that and I don't think you would have
pioneered it as well or as effectively if you weren't
so good. I mean, Hard as a band that people love,
love and play their music and just go nuts say
this that music is really important to them. So I'm
wondering when you go out on stage for the first time,
(23:01):
or when you go into a studio for the first
time without your sister. Now you're on your own. When
was the time you first went on stage to perform
and it was Nancy Wilson alone? When was that and
what was that like for you?
Speaker 2 (23:14):
The first real time was after the pandemic, I think.
I mean, I've done sit ins with such Pearl Jam
and sat in with you know, various Seattle friends and
bands in Seattle, but to perform after the pandemic solo.
The first time I really went out there to a
big audience was in Seattle at the performance center called
(23:38):
ben Arroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony. So hey, no pressure,
just the Seattle Symphony.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
It was like at the end of the first half
of the pandemic. I guess there was a windover of
time when it was everybody was still wearing masks, but
it was okay for a minute to go do stuff.
So I had made a solo album in my home
studio remotely with the other members of the band in
(24:06):
Heart that were in Heart at the time, and released
a solo album called You and Me and So I went.
I agreed to do this big sold out show at
the Benaroya Hall with a Seattle Symphony, and I walked
out there. It was like, oh, oh yeah, I've been
(24:28):
sucking my house for about a year. You know, Oh
I remember being on stage. Now, why are my knees shaking?
You know, like, But it took a couple songs, and
by the time I was in to the show, you know,
just got over the hello, I'm here, I'm on a stage.
(24:49):
How are you? It was really nerve wracky.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And how was it without her? Meaning you're used to
performing with a certain group of people, whether they're related
to you or not. What was it like to go
out and do that without your partner?
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Well, it was freeing. I like to talk about songs
when I'm going to do them on stage, so I
ended up getting really talkative on stage as a solo
artist with Nancy Wilson's Heart, the various forms that I
took the last four years. I go into a song
called Mistral Wind and I tell usually I've been telling
(25:24):
the story of the Great Ulysses, which is kind of
what the song is about, where you know, an innocent
individual gets in a boat, goes out on life's journey,
you know, to encounter the worst storm they'll ever survive,
and the sirens will be calling from the rocks, and
the ship almost crashes on the rocks and you nearly die.
(25:47):
And then if you tie yourself to the mast and
resist all of the temptations of evil, then you might
finally find yourself floating into a calm lagoon where your
life has changed forever. You'll never be the same, but
you live to tell, you know, the tale of great
(26:10):
ulysses in a nutshell. Something simple, something simple like that.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah, musician Nancy Wilson, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell
a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing
on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, Nancy Wilson shares why the guitar
(26:36):
is her best friend. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening
to Here's the Thing, don't you suppy? That's Nancy Wilson
(27:22):
performing I'll Find You, from her twenty twenty one album
You and Me. It may seem that both Anne and
Nancy Wilson were always destined to be Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame inductees. As members of the band Heart,
But life almost took Nancy down another path when she
(27:42):
attended college in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, I was really ambitious with my studies. I really
had a wild eyed idea that I would learn Russian
as well as German, and I would be proficient at
creative writing classes. And I was taking some of the
required like chemistry stuff. So I was really overly ambitious
(28:10):
about all of it.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
What was it about you that you were seeking something
in that way?
Speaker 2 (28:17):
I was really inspired at the time by Sue Ennis,
our then collaborator. She had gone to Berkeley, and she
was in grad school at Berkeley, and she was turning
me onto all these really great books and concepts and
Carlos Costeneda and all kinds of really mind expanding, you know,
(28:39):
without the drugs, which we'd already tried. How to spell,
how to write a paper, how to research a paper,
and write about things that I wanted to know about,
like Romantic tradition and European history and stuff that I
figured I would bring back to my own creative song
(29:00):
writing skills when I joined Heart after I took some
of those classes, so I was I was playing acoustic
solo shows at a little bar called the Pepper Grinder
down the street from the university with my guitar that
(29:20):
you know that I was earning enough money to buy
records with and play records in my dorm room with.
So it was just, you know, I guess I was
really like romanticized college girl. Kind of a college girl.
I was just romantic with it. I would play my music,
and I would write my poetry and write my creative
writing and do my studies and you know, and it
(29:42):
was a girl's dorm. There was no co ed at
the time, so you know, I even got in trouble
with the other with the at the boys dorm one
time at a party. I mean, it was just like
all of the stuff, being a younger sister of three
sisters to get my own declaration of independence as an
(30:05):
individual before I joined NaN's band, because I'd been her
shadow for the most part, the youngest all my life.
So I figured I'm going to go get some skills
before I joined the rock band, and that's what I did.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Why isn't your sister Liz in the act? Would you say?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Lynn's musically inclined? She fell in love like the first
year she went to college. She fell in love and
got pregnant right away. So she married a guy that
helped him get out of the Vietnam War draft. So
she kind of went a different journey.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
She had a boy or a girl.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
She had two boys, two boys.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Now, well, the time we have left. When you write music,
when you've written music with heart before and beyond in
your life, now, what do you think is the thing
you gravitate to more naturally? Like I'm the biggest fan
and of love songs depending on who crafted them. Like
(31:04):
I always say to people like, you know, Stevie Wonder
wrote the most beautiful love songs. I can listen to
his music all day long and create him.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
You know, all is fair in love.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
And in the sky and songs like that. Yeah, But
for you, it's like, what music do you gravitate more
towards love songs? Heartache? What's what's the music that comes
out of you more readily?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well, love songs are heartache. Okay, not always that's true,
but you know, happy little songs, there's always got to
be an element of melancholy. For me, I think I
really gravitate towards the complexity of what a love song
can be like, you know, I'm reading Bernie Taupin's book
(31:51):
Scatter Shop right now, and I'm getting close to the
end of it. It's so cool to see his take
on his lyric writing as a songwriter, because Tiny Dancer
is such a great love song. But I don't know.
I think be a songwriter, you're always basically writing about
(32:11):
love in one way or another, whether or not you're
angry with someone or you want you know, you're imploring
something out of someone for more understanding or more connection
somehow with the world or with their world. So I
don't know. I think heartbreak is the best inspiration in
(32:35):
many ways for writing music. And if you're a sensitive
creative type person, you know, which is a blessing and
a super curse, you're going to feel all of it
and you're going to try to write about it, which
is no easy to ask.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Now, when you were you united with your sister recently
to perform together again, How did that feel when you
stepped out there with her again and performed.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
It was really cool. I kind of keep saying this
about it because we're gonna go on a big tour
sure starting in April, a world tour actually, and we
just did a few shows around. On New Year's Eve,
we played in Seattle. It was a hometown you know, kids,
kind of victory lap and it felt so it feels
(33:22):
so good to be on a stage with her because
we have a shorthand, we have each other's secret code,
secret language that we speak, and we know each other
so well. You don't even have to say anything. You
just see their face and you go, oh, okay, oh gotcha.
It's so natural. It's you know, everything else that swirls
(33:44):
around the camp of getting a heart. The big metal
machine of heart started up again, is way more complicated
than the actual nucleus, the center, the eye of the
hurricane itself, which is me and Anne.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
I hope you're doing your pilates. Oh yes, I'm getting
ready to get out there.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
I'm strength training and all kinds of pilates.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Part is not Dan Fogelberg, You know what I mean.
We need a little energy here, We need some energy.
We need we need to be bouncing around every now
and then.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
You know, well, you know me, I like my rocker size. Yeah,
I do my rocker side. So I'm I'm I've got
a trainer. I'm actually working out with a trade.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Ready like Mick Jaggs. He's getting ready.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Oh man, can you imagine bounce?
Speaker 1 (34:32):
He's still bouncing now. My last question for you, which
of course is from our special consultant who came on
his guy. I said, a mom with her today, said
do you have a question to ask? He said, ask her?
How is it she can play that guitar so well
and she rarely practices.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Oh that's a good question. Well, of course it's a
good question, right. What practices for me is trying to
write a new song. So when I come back to
the guitar, it's like, wow, it's a reunion and I'm
trying something new out and I've learned something here that
I didn't even know before because I'm not trying to
(35:13):
practice what I already know.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
It's a great answer. They go hand in hand. The
relationship with the guitar is also embedded in songwriting.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, for me, it is, and it's a best friend relationship.
It's always a discovery of how's your day going. Well,
here's how my day's going. And I'm going to sound
like this today because you are talking to me about
what we're talking about together, me and the guitar. So
(35:40):
it's definitely. Yeah, it's my best friend. It says things
for me that I want to say.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Well, let me just say, man, I love you solo.
I love your sister solo, but I like the two
of you together. I mean, you guys are one of
the greatest rock and roll acts of all time. And
the range, you know, just I mean, obviously there's all
these hits, and there's beautiful ballads in there as well.
I mean, Dog and Butterflies, such a gorgeous song. You
(36:07):
guys together is something I think everybody's gonna be excited about.
Come April. You go on tour in April.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Correct, in April. On the twentieth or fort show, it
is true that there's a perception about heart that only
really exists when the two of us are together. That
is what heart is.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Barry Gibb was on the show and we talked about
blood harmony. Yeah, and when you talk sometimes you sound
like Anne give a very similar tambur to your voices.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
You know, we're getting a film together about our story,
which is not easy. We're trying to get a writer
foot to it. But people say, you know, who would
play you? You know, if you're doing a movie about heart,
and right now, I mean, I know El Fanning can sing,
and so I've think in El Fanning and Dakota for
(37:00):
and would be so interesting of a pair up because
they're sisters too.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah. Blood harmony, blood harmony. Right, all my best to you,
Thank you so much, big.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Love back at you, and thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
My thanks to Nancy Wilson. You can find more information
about Heart's world tour at heartdash music dot com. I'll
leave you with a little more of Crazy on You
off their nineteen seventy five album Dreamboat Annie. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Thing from iHeart Radio.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
Still Time Studio.
Speaker 1 (00:33):
This is the history making rock band Heart with Crazy
on You. Off their nineteen seventy five album Dreamboat Annie
with Anne on lead vocals and Nancy on guitar, the
Wilson's created a unique mix of rock, pop, and folk
(00:57):
that would earn them twenty top forty singles, four Grammy nominations,
and sell thirty five million records worldwide. Along the way,
Hart went on to become one of the longest lasting
and commercially successful bands of all time. Now they are
(01:18):
reuniting for a world tour next week. I'll speak with
Heart's lead singer Anne Wilson, but first I'll talk with
my guest today, guitarist and vocalist Nancy Wilson. In addition
to her numerous accomplishments with Heart, Nancy Wilson also formed
the band road Case Royale and as a BAFTA winning
(01:41):
film composer. I wanted to know when Nancy and her
sister Anne, both Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners, first started
writing music together.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
Well, we had many bands before we had Heart. We
had little bands called the Viewpoint and Rapunzel and acoustic
all girl bands and played at schools and you know,
churches and living a lot of living rooms, and we
started trying to write as soon as we could play guitars,
(02:14):
which was I was about nine or ten when we
started trying to write songs. And they were bad songs,
very bad songs. And then when we actually got a
real band, somebody that had a van, you know, at
a basement and a mom that didn't care, that's when
we started to get real serious about writing better songs,
(02:36):
because at that point we had audiences and clubs and
you know stuff like that, real drums and microphones and
amplifiers and things.
Speaker 1 (02:47):
Did someone teach you how to play the guitar? Your
self taught self taught.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
I knew a little bit of piano already, musical family,
from the grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, so
everybody knew out of harmonize and play ukulele and some
piano over here. So we came by it, you know, honestly,
to be musicians.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
When did you believe you could play the guitar? When
do you really start to say I think I got this?
I think I can really do this. How old are you.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Well, by the time I've been playing for about six months,
I knew I was.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Going to you're nine and a half. Yeah, nine and
a half. You conquered it when you're nine and a half.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
Well, we saw the Beatles play the Ed Sullivan Show
on our black and white grandmother's television in La Jolla, California,
you know, like the lunar landing. It was just the
moment to be struck by that lightning, and the culture
changed it, you know, forever ever since everything the world changed.
(03:49):
And so I knew right then I had to have
a guitar, and I was good at it right away.
Speaker 1 (03:56):
Now you're a famous guitar player. When did you get
your hands on your first guitar that you were like,
this is more like it.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Well, it was Anne's guitar that I snuck away from
her because she had a good one that our grandma
gave her when she had mono nucleosis and she was
holed up in bed with our other sister, Lynn, and
they were trying to get well and doing hobbies like
learning how to play guitar. But that was when I
(04:24):
could play, So I would sneak it away and try
to learn how to use a good guitar. But I
figured she had like just a natural gift from above
with her voice, and so with me as the accompanist
and her voice, it was a natural like, hey, kids,
(04:45):
come on downstairs, we're having a party. Do your ethel
Merman imitation, right? So Anne would.
Speaker 3 (04:51):
Go, hey, do the ethel Merman as I show. Yeah, so,
and I'd be playing it on a guitar. So we
started out.
Speaker 2 (05:05):
Kind of like a little comedy troupe for our friend parents' parties,
and and you know, I guess the rest is history.
Speaker 1 (05:13):
But when you say comedy, you mean that you didn't
have enough songs, you'd learn, you didn't feel confident enough
making it strictly. You wanted to make people laugh and
play music correct.
Speaker 2 (05:23):
Yeah, it was. It had to be fun obviously when
you're young too, you know it's got to be hysterical
or it's not worthwhile. So we did comedy skits in
the in the garage and plays that we would charge
tickets for and do like dance routines to records that
we've played. We put on little productions and Anne was
(05:45):
always the manager, being the older you know, four years
older sister. So we ham hambones, you know, just performing
somehow or any way we could perform, we would.
Speaker 1 (05:58):
I bet every boy in that neighborhood was there in
your yard. They were lying outside your.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Garage five cents for kool aid, you know.
Speaker 1 (06:06):
Yeah, popcorn kool aid. Now, when you talk about that
performance inclination, and obviously you're very young at the time,
you never had any thoughts about acting beyond you know,
over the years, how do you ever consider acting acting?
Speaker 2 (06:20):
I thought maybe I should try some one time, you know,
so because being a goofball and being a handbone, you know,
you're just like, well, hey, I'm not afraid of, you know,
trying to be goofy in front of people. So at
one point when I was married to a writer director,
so I got to do a part in a movie
(06:40):
you was filming at the time, called say Anything Right.
And I'd already been working on music for the films
that he was doing at the time. But I thought, oh,
you know, I could try to be an actor, I guess,
And so I tried. I failed miserably. It was like
not built to be an actor?
Speaker 1 (07:01):
Really?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Why?
Speaker 1 (07:02):
Why?
Speaker 2 (07:04):
Because I don't know how to inhabit someone else's character,
I guess, but I do end up, like I tried twice.
Another movie I tried to do a bigger speaking part
with called The Wildlife. I was a pregnant cops wife
that answers the dover and the the other girl was
(07:25):
there and I tried to, you know, be real and I've.
Speaker 1 (07:29):
Got to go watch this movie The wild Life. So bad.
Speaker 2 (07:33):
Yeah, so bad.
Speaker 1 (07:33):
I love that I do too.
Speaker 2 (07:37):
They're beautifully bad.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Anyway, so I failed miserably, So no acting.
Speaker 1 (07:43):
You cut that short pretty early.
Speaker 2 (07:44):
Well, I realized, you know, I meant to be a
musician and I'm not meant to be an actor. But
I do end up having like complete respect. And this
is something I wanted to say to you, as an
amazing actor yourself, how much I really do have, Like
it's incredulous how much work goes into that. Like there's
(08:07):
so much to it to be an actor, being able
to memorize lines and being able to deliver something as
kind of someone else, you know, in a part like that.
I have ultimate respect for the job you do.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
Well, No, that's very kind. I mean, for me, it's
always been the motivation has always been, you know, you
just don't think too much about it. When you play
a tough role of the person's what I call the
negative value and the piece, they're very tough, you know.
When you play Hitler, you got to give it everything
you've got. You got to play that role and it's tough.
You know, you don't want to be that person, but
you can't go there. So you just it's like jumping
(08:42):
in the cold water. You just got to go. You
just got to do it not really think about it
very much.
Speaker 2 (08:46):
You have to kind of not think about it.
Speaker 1 (08:48):
So you wrote music with Cameron Kevin Crowe. How did
that start? How did you start? It was soundtrack or
score or both?
Speaker 2 (08:58):
Well, No, we had had music, you know, love of
music as friends together forever and so it was kind
of like we got together as a couple. We were
first kind of dating and it was like, Okay, who
do you like? Who do you like? He goes, I
like the guess who? And it's like, ooh, I'm not
sure about the guests who you know, but I kind
(09:20):
of grew to love them kind of thanks to Cavin Crowe.
Speaker 1 (09:23):
You know.
Speaker 2 (09:23):
So we had like music things we would just you know,
just talk and talk and talk about music Elton John.
And you know, Tiny Dancer was a big song for us,
and like we go like, oh, like a puppet cha,
you know, like we'd have our Elton John accent singing
(09:43):
Elton John.
Speaker 1 (09:44):
I want to make you sing a lot of songs
now that you open up this can been singing that
for us.
Speaker 2 (09:49):
Well, I'm I'm going to practice for a thing I'm
doing with some of Elton John's players at this benefit
for Hillside benefit, like this weekend, so I get to
play with Elton. I'm just a super fan. I'm a shameless,
giddy super fan around all those guys.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
Oh my god, Now, when did you start writing songs that?
Actually they're in his films? That begins? When well, that begins?
Speaker 2 (10:13):
I started working on his first film, Say Anything, and
I worked with there was a scoring artist. I worked
with her a little bit in the recording studio to
add a guitar part to the score that they were
already doing for Say Anything. And I was like, I
don't know how to read charts. I'm freaking out because
(10:34):
I didn't know how to read charts. I don't read
I learned how to read music, but I never used it.
So I lost that language along the way because I
just had it all in my head on ear, you know.
I'd do everything by ear. So Anne kind of took
me in and somebody showed me how to read the
chart and how to go D D D, you know,
(10:58):
in a scene and say anything. Was like my first
foray into scoring with other musicians in a scoring studio.
Speaker 1 (11:08):
And you did other films with them as well.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
Yeah, and the next one I did was Jerry Maguire
by myself. So I had a friend's studio and I
I went to Costco. I got a little tiny cassette
TV cassette player like VCR and that's what the dailies
were printed on at the time. He had a good
(11:32):
microphone and a six track reel to reel and so
no soundproofing, nothing, just somebody's house in a spare room
with you know, garbage trucks and dogs barking.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
Outside, and you're on the guitar or the piano on
the guitar.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
And keyboards and percussion. I did everything wow, and some
vocal stuff, but it was like it was like, oh,
gotta wait for the garbage truck, you know, to press record.
But I would like I would do the countdown on
tape to the cassette that I put on this TV
that luckily wasn't loud enough to pick up on the microphone,
(12:13):
but it was like so loovi. It was ridiculous. There
was no time I saw the timecode on the cassette
for the scene. I was recording onto with one really
good microphone on a really good guitar in a very
noisy room, and it all worked because the guitar was
close enough. At one point we used a few mics
(12:34):
and spread the guitar sound out like stereo. We filled
up the whole tape with one guitar.
Speaker 1 (12:40):
And when you do this for people who don't know,
you don't wait to watch a cut and the music flows.
You're doing it. Scenes are coming, you cut scenes and
footage and you're writing stuff to that, or you wait
till you get a full cut of the film.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
I wrote a lot of stuff to ongoing cuts, like
scenes that were changed later, pieces of scenes that I
would do music for which I would have to redo
later all over again when it was cut together. But
there was still a lot of learning process for me
(13:16):
just to try to cut to picture because normally I
just you know, play music for songwriting, and so it
was an entirely different language to learn for me, how
to stay out of the way of a scene where
there's a dialogue happening and have not to step on
the words, and how to create sort of an atmospheric
(13:40):
like some air around you know. So less is more
in a lot of cases, which is one of the
biggest lessons I learned about scoring music as opposed to
just writing songs for you know, hysterical screaming women kind
of songs.
Speaker 1 (13:58):
Yeah, could you do almost famous? Well?
Speaker 2 (14:01):
I did almost famous. Yeah, I think that was the masterpiece.
Really well.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
He had a great line to me when I worked
with him. We were talking about parenting. I met your
sons and we were hanging out one day, and he
said to me, something led up to one thing led
to another. He goes, well, he is, I try to
have some understanding of my kids, considering that their father
is an Academy Award winning screenwriter and their mother's in
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bit of pressure,
(14:27):
a little bit of pressure.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, you know, there's there's therapy involved, you know, because
I mean, why wouldn't there be, you know, because that's
a lot pressure on little guys and there are two
twin boys that they're really good people. Thank God for that,
because we managed to do something right along the way.
(14:48):
But but you know, being being hard working archest type people,
creatives that it doesn't really allow for just your everyday
average I mean, and I always made a dinner table,
I always lit candles, we always had dinner together.
Speaker 1 (15:09):
Hearts Nancy Wilson. If you enjoy conversations with gifted rockers,
be sure to check out my episode with musician Patti Smith.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
I didn't really come into the music business. I wound
up in music by mistake. I'm not really a musician.
I didn't really want to be a musician or a singer.
I wanted to be a poet and a writer. And
it was accidental. So would it accidentally happen now? I
don't think so. I think I would have to be
(15:39):
more focused on what I wanted. But also because I'm
so untechnological, I mean, I'm just not really suited for
right now, so probably I would have to be like
a physicist.
Speaker 1 (15:53):
Drove of the band the game. Oh you don't even drive.
Speaker 4 (15:55):
No, I don't know how to drive, so I couldn't
do that.
Speaker 1 (16:01):
Hear more of my conversation with Patti Smith that Here's
the Thing dot org. After the break, Nancy Wilson shares
how things have changed for women in the industry since
she started out and how it feels to be one
of the founding women of rock. I'm Alec Baldwin and
(16:30):
you're listening to Here's the Thing wish This is You
and Me, the title track from Nancy Wilson's twenty twenty
one debut solo album, Who Is You and Me? And
(17:01):
Me for decades playing sold out stadiums and recording hit
records was another day on the job for the members
of Heart. I wanted to know how Nancy Wilson felt
about juggling the demands of her music career while raising
her children with then husband director Cameron Crowe.
Speaker 2 (17:23):
Well, the scheduling of trying to be together yeah, really challenging.
The idea going in was, okay, if we have kids,
we'll take one project at a time and the other
person stays song. But that's not really how you try.
You try to do that doesn't work out, It doesn't
work as well as you want it to work. Getting
(17:45):
together we made a big point of always, you know,
when we were all together, we would really be together
and not just go and do stuff that was distracting.
We would hang out and almost the favorite story I
have even after we were not married anymore, but I
had the kids at my place. I lived in Topanga
(18:05):
Canyon for a while. There was a big power out,
like there always is in Topanga. The power went out,
and the boys were there and I lit the fire,
lit the candles and had the lanterns. It's like, well,
I could light the stove and I could still make dinner.
So let's tell ghost stories. So you know. So we
(18:26):
had the candles, we had the firelight, and we told stories,
and then we had a story contest and each person
went around and told let's pick categories. So it was
really a great thing when the power went out, because
it was a beautiful life lesson and a learning, you know,
(18:48):
an instructional moment for them as well as for me
as a parent, about taking all the artifice away and
just being together.
Speaker 1 (18:59):
Now, questions are going to go hand in hand. One
is some of these female goddesses of music precede you
by a few years, and some of them are you know,
right around you know your time. You're talking about Stevie Nicks,
and then before you, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, Linda
Ronstadt and so forth. For you, was it I mean,
(19:20):
let's face it, your sister and you both during your
heyday were these gorgeous women. And we talked to your
sister about, you know, the difficulties of that, about how
women lived in that world back then. Was it tough
where people it's the word impolite untoward, Yes.
Speaker 2 (19:37):
I mean it was a different era. Men were way
less evolved the pre feminization of men. Yes, but I
think it was just part for the course. And we
didn't really care because we were military brats from the
Marine Corps, like a Marine Corps aristocracy, to be honest.
(19:58):
And so a grand dad was a brigadier general with
four stars, and our uncle and our granddad other granddad
and our dad was a military you know star and
also the conductor of the military band as well. So
and so we had this kind of breviera. I think
(20:20):
we were just burly girls, you know that just didn't
take the guff.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
You're confident, Yeah, we.
Speaker 2 (20:27):
Were just confident. We kind of felt like one of
the guys. We didn't have brothers, so guys in bands
were kind of became our brothers, and we were equal,
we felt equal. We wanted democracy, We wanted a democracy
of a band with men. And our influences were not
Janis Choplin. They were Jimmy Page, you know. So our
(20:50):
heroes and our muses were more the rock guys. So
we wanted to be able to kind of transform or
you know, be gender free, you know, not gender specific.
Speaker 1 (21:04):
Well, it seems like there's a reality when you're home,
you're treated a certain way with respect, and everything is
much more decent and honest at home. And then when
you go out to the filthy cesspool of rock and
roll music ticket sales, then it's a different thing with
the people are just animals. I mean, they're just they
don't get it. But then when you do that and
(21:26):
you're enduring all those things that they're well, that's obviously
what I've gotten. But what you see now is these
monolithic stars, female stars. The biggest names in music now
are women. It's obviously Taylor Swift and Beyonce, Miley Cyrus.
I mean, all of the biggest acts today are female acts.
Speaker 2 (21:48):
Boy genus, boy genius.
Speaker 1 (21:50):
You like, oh yeah, when you see them put together
these I don't want to say bubble or world, but operation.
They got an operation in which they're taken care of.
I think a lot of the crap that women had
to put up with has been subtracted from their lives.
They've set up a system, they've set up an organization
where that doesn't even come into the picture, the way
(22:10):
they're treated, you know.
Speaker 2 (22:12):
Yeah, well that's a really good point. I mean, I
think that's really true, and I'm really happy things have changed,
really happy about that. I mean, things have evolved in
a really positive direction.
Speaker 1 (22:23):
If you're making money, by the way, and they're.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
Making yeah, they're changing the world economy basically too, so
like Taylor Swift, but I'm really glad for that. I'm
really kind of proud in a certain way, amazing to
have been a bit of a founder for some of
that stuff.
Speaker 1 (22:40):
Yes, but also let me just say this, which is
you pioneer that and I don't think you would have
pioneered it as well or as effectively if you weren't
so good. I mean, Hard as a band that people love,
love and play their music and just go nuts say
this that music is really important to them. So I'm
wondering when you go out on stage for the first time,
(23:01):
or when you go into a studio for the first
time without your sister. Now you're on your own. When
was the time you first went on stage to perform
and it was Nancy Wilson alone? When was that and
what was that like for you?
Speaker 2 (23:14):
The first real time was after the pandemic, I think.
I mean, I've done sit ins with such Pearl Jam
and sat in with you know, various Seattle friends and
bands in Seattle, but to perform after the pandemic solo.
The first time I really went out there to a
big audience was in Seattle at the performance center called
(23:38):
ben Arroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony. So hey, no pressure,
just the Seattle Symphony.
Speaker 1 (23:45):
You know.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
It was like at the end of the first half
of the pandemic. I guess there was a windover of
time when it was everybody was still wearing masks, but
it was okay for a minute to go do stuff.
So I had made a solo album in my home
studio remotely with the other members of the band in
(24:06):
Heart that were in Heart at the time, and released
a solo album called You and Me and So I went.
I agreed to do this big sold out show at
the Benaroya Hall with a Seattle Symphony, and I walked
out there. It was like, oh, oh yeah, I've been
(24:28):
sucking my house for about a year. You know, Oh
I remember being on stage. Now, why are my knees shaking?
You know, like, But it took a couple songs, and
by the time I was in to the show, you know,
just got over the hello, I'm here, I'm on a stage.
(24:49):
How are you? It was really nerve wracky.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
And how was it without her? Meaning you're used to
performing with a certain group of people, whether they're related
to you or not. What was it like to go
out and do that without your partner?
Speaker 2 (25:01):
Well, it was freeing. I like to talk about songs
when I'm going to do them on stage, so I
ended up getting really talkative on stage as a solo
artist with Nancy Wilson's Heart, the various forms that I
took the last four years. I go into a song
called Mistral Wind and I tell usually I've been telling
(25:24):
the story of the Great Ulysses, which is kind of
what the song is about, where you know, an innocent
individual gets in a boat, goes out on life's journey,
you know, to encounter the worst storm they'll ever survive,
and the sirens will be calling from the rocks, and
the ship almost crashes on the rocks and you nearly die.
(25:47):
And then if you tie yourself to the mast and
resist all of the temptations of evil, then you might
finally find yourself floating into a calm lagoon where your
life has changed forever. You'll never be the same, but
you live to tell, you know, the tale of great
(26:10):
ulysses in a nutshell. Something simple, something simple like that.
Speaker 1 (26:15):
Yeah, musician Nancy Wilson, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell
a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing
on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.
When we come back, Nancy Wilson shares why the guitar
(26:36):
is her best friend. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening
to Here's the Thing, don't you suppy? That's Nancy Wilson
(27:22):
performing I'll Find You, from her twenty twenty one album
You and Me. It may seem that both Anne and
Nancy Wilson were always destined to be Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame inductees. As members of the band Heart,
But life almost took Nancy down another path when she
(27:42):
attended college in the Pacific Northwest.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
Well, I was really ambitious with my studies. I really
had a wild eyed idea that I would learn Russian
as well as German, and I would be proficient at
creative writing classes. And I was taking some of the
required like chemistry stuff. So I was really overly ambitious
(28:10):
about all of it.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
What was it about you that you were seeking something
in that way?
Speaker 2 (28:17):
I was really inspired at the time by Sue Ennis,
our then collaborator. She had gone to Berkeley, and she
was in grad school at Berkeley, and she was turning
me onto all these really great books and concepts and
Carlos Costeneda and all kinds of really mind expanding, you know,
(28:39):
without the drugs, which we'd already tried. How to spell,
how to write a paper, how to research a paper,
and write about things that I wanted to know about,
like Romantic tradition and European history and stuff that I
figured I would bring back to my own creative song
(29:00):
writing skills when I joined Heart after I took some
of those classes, so I was I was playing acoustic
solo shows at a little bar called the Pepper Grinder
down the street from the university with my guitar that
(29:20):
you know that I was earning enough money to buy
records with and play records in my dorm room with.
So it was just, you know, I guess I was
really like romanticized college girl. Kind of a college girl.
I was just romantic with it. I would play my music,
and I would write my poetry and write my creative
writing and do my studies and you know, and it
(29:42):
was a girl's dorm. There was no co ed at
the time, so you know, I even got in trouble
with the other with the at the boys dorm one
time at a party. I mean, it was just like
all of the stuff, being a younger sister of three
sisters to get my own declaration of independence as an
(30:05):
individual before I joined NaN's band, because I'd been her
shadow for the most part, the youngest all my life.
So I figured I'm going to go get some skills
before I joined the rock band, and that's what I did.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
Why isn't your sister Liz in the act? Would you say?
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Lynn's musically inclined? She fell in love like the first
year she went to college. She fell in love and
got pregnant right away. So she married a guy that
helped him get out of the Vietnam War draft. So
she kind of went a different journey.
Speaker 1 (30:40):
She had a boy or a girl.
Speaker 2 (30:42):
She had two boys, two boys.
Speaker 1 (30:44):
Now, well, the time we have left. When you write music,
when you've written music with heart before and beyond in
your life, now, what do you think is the thing
you gravitate to more naturally? Like I'm the biggest fan
and of love songs depending on who crafted them. Like
(31:04):
I always say to people like, you know, Stevie Wonder
wrote the most beautiful love songs. I can listen to
his music all day long and create him.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
You know, all is fair in love.
Speaker 1 (31:15):
And in the sky and songs like that. Yeah, But
for you, it's like, what music do you gravitate more
towards love songs? Heartache? What's what's the music that comes
out of you more readily?
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Well, love songs are heartache. Okay, not always that's true,
but you know, happy little songs, there's always got to
be an element of melancholy. For me, I think I
really gravitate towards the complexity of what a love song
can be like, you know, I'm reading Bernie Taupin's book
(31:51):
Scatter Shop right now, and I'm getting close to the
end of it. It's so cool to see his take
on his lyric writing as a songwriter, because Tiny Dancer
is such a great love song. But I don't know.
I think be a songwriter, you're always basically writing about
(32:11):
love in one way or another, whether or not you're
angry with someone or you want you know, you're imploring
something out of someone for more understanding or more connection
somehow with the world or with their world. So I
don't know. I think heartbreak is the best inspiration in
(32:35):
many ways for writing music. And if you're a sensitive
creative type person, you know, which is a blessing and
a super curse, you're going to feel all of it
and you're going to try to write about it, which
is no easy to ask.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Now, when you were you united with your sister recently
to perform together again, How did that feel when you
stepped out there with her again and performed.
Speaker 2 (32:59):
It was really cool. I kind of keep saying this
about it because we're gonna go on a big tour
sure starting in April, a world tour actually, and we
just did a few shows around. On New Year's Eve,
we played in Seattle. It was a hometown you know, kids,
kind of victory lap and it felt so it feels
(33:22):
so good to be on a stage with her because
we have a shorthand, we have each other's secret code,
secret language that we speak, and we know each other
so well. You don't even have to say anything. You
just see their face and you go, oh, okay, oh gotcha.
It's so natural. It's you know, everything else that swirls
(33:44):
around the camp of getting a heart. The big metal
machine of heart started up again, is way more complicated
than the actual nucleus, the center, the eye of the
hurricane itself, which is me and Anne.
Speaker 1 (34:00):
I hope you're doing your pilates. Oh yes, I'm getting
ready to get out there.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
I'm strength training and all kinds of pilates.
Speaker 1 (34:08):
Part is not Dan Fogelberg, You know what I mean.
We need a little energy here, We need some energy.
We need we need to be bouncing around every now
and then.
Speaker 2 (34:17):
You know, well, you know me, I like my rocker size. Yeah,
I do my rocker side. So I'm I'm I've got
a trainer. I'm actually working out with a trade.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
Ready like Mick Jaggs. He's getting ready.
Speaker 2 (34:30):
Oh man, can you imagine bounce?
Speaker 1 (34:32):
He's still bouncing now. My last question for you, which
of course is from our special consultant who came on
his guy. I said, a mom with her today, said
do you have a question to ask? He said, ask her?
How is it she can play that guitar so well
and she rarely practices.
Speaker 2 (34:50):
Oh that's a good question. Well, of course it's a
good question, right. What practices for me is trying to
write a new song. So when I come back to
the guitar, it's like, wow, it's a reunion and I'm
trying something new out and I've learned something here that
I didn't even know before because I'm not trying to
(35:13):
practice what I already know.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
It's a great answer. They go hand in hand. The
relationship with the guitar is also embedded in songwriting.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
Yeah, for me, it is, and it's a best friend relationship.
It's always a discovery of how's your day going. Well,
here's how my day's going. And I'm going to sound
like this today because you are talking to me about
what we're talking about together, me and the guitar. So
(35:40):
it's definitely. Yeah, it's my best friend. It says things
for me that I want to say.
Speaker 1 (35:47):
Well, let me just say, man, I love you solo.
I love your sister solo, but I like the two
of you together. I mean, you guys are one of
the greatest rock and roll acts of all time. And
the range, you know, just I mean, obviously there's all
these hits, and there's beautiful ballads in there as well.
I mean, Dog and Butterflies, such a gorgeous song. You
(36:07):
guys together is something I think everybody's gonna be excited about.
Come April. You go on tour in April.
Speaker 2 (36:13):
Correct, in April. On the twentieth or fort show, it
is true that there's a perception about heart that only
really exists when the two of us are together. That
is what heart is.
Speaker 1 (36:28):
Barry Gibb was on the show and we talked about
blood harmony. Yeah, and when you talk sometimes you sound
like Anne give a very similar tambur to your voices.
Speaker 2 (36:37):
You know, we're getting a film together about our story,
which is not easy. We're trying to get a writer
foot to it. But people say, you know, who would
play you? You know, if you're doing a movie about heart,
and right now, I mean, I know El Fanning can sing,
and so I've think in El Fanning and Dakota for
(37:00):
and would be so interesting of a pair up because
they're sisters too.
Speaker 1 (37:05):
Yeah. Blood harmony, blood harmony. Right, all my best to you,
Thank you so much, big.
Speaker 2 (37:10):
Love back at you, and thank you so much.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
My thanks to Nancy Wilson. You can find more information
about Heart's world tour at heartdash music dot com. I'll
leave you with a little more of Crazy on You
off their nineteen seventy five album Dreamboat Annie. I'm Alec Baldwin.
Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.
Popular Podcasts
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
The Nikki Glaser Podcast
Every week comedian and infamous roaster Nikki Glaser provides a fun, fast-paced, and brutally honest look into current pop-culture and her own personal life.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.