Nancy Wilson Of Heart Reveals All About New Solo LP ‘You & Me’, Seeing The Beatles & Sexy Guitars (INTERVIEW)

Nancy Wilson is stoked that her solo album, You & Me, is finally available for her fans to hear in it’s entirety. Released this past Friday, May 7th, Wilson had dropped several singles – including a cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “The Rising” and a tribute to her friend Eddie Van Halen titled “4 Edward” – over the past several months, leaving fans salivating for the whole shebang. With the wait finally over and reviewers praising Wilson’s solo debut, the Heart guitar player is already anticipating the next step: playing live once again.

With the official announcement of Wilson performing with the Seattle Symphony on July 9th, she is planning on performing songs from her new album as well as some Heart favorites. “It just sounds so fun,” Wilson told me during an interview earlier this year. There will be a limited audience but the show will also be available via streaming.

No doubt she will be performing the aforementioned songs, as well as others from her twelve-song album. Her rendition of Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” is stirring, capturing the intimate passion that the duo did so breathtakingly beautiful in 1969. “Party At The Angel Ballroom” has slight touches of Seattle punk, thanks to Duff McKagan and Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins, while “Walk Away” gives voice to realization and ultimate inner empowerment. Pearl Jam’s “Daughter” takes the anger of the original and gives it a feminine power of rage while the title track celebrates motherhood in a seventies liquid loveliness. 

The history of Nancy Wilson is well-known: alongside her sister Ann, they forged a rock & roll career as Heart, with songs that ranged from the tough and feisty “Barracuda” and “Even It Up,” to the ballady power rockers “Magic Man” and “Alone,” to the simple harmonies of “Dog & Butterfly,” the mandolin infused “Battle Of Evermore” and the instrumental “Silver Wheels.” Nancy has had original music in movies like Say Anything and Elizabethtown and she has recorded and performed with her band Roadcase Royale. Earlier this year she was honored at the She Rocks Awards and when I asked her if winning awards was something she had dreamed about in her youth, she responded with a laugh, saying, “All I wanted to get out of it was a million thrills.” She did, however, concede that, “Doing what I do is my calling, so being acknowledged and recognized for it is always a good thing. It can make your day to get an award, that’s for sure.”

For Wilson, it’s always been about the music, especially when it came to You & Me. “I created this new album with the idea of bringing something aspirational for all of us having been through such a tough year,” she explained in a press announcement. Her instrumental homage “4 Edward” had a special meaning, as Heart and Van Halen were often tour mates. “I knew Eddie pretty well. We’d toured a bunch together and I got to give him his first acoustic guitar, which is one of my favorite stories to tell,” she told me in our previous interview. “Everybody and his brother tried to make that style their own but it was just too late, you know. Eddie had already did it and he did it the best.”

In our second interview of 2021, Wilson talked about more of the songs on her album, her upcoming plans, her youthful attempt at being a mechanic, seeing The Beatles in 1966 and her collaborative camaraderie with longtime friend Sue Ennis.

Nancy, it must feel really good that your album is about to come out.

It feels really exciting and good and I’m really pleased with the way it turned out. So far there has been a really positive response and I like that people have a whole bunch of different picks from the album, which I think is great. It’s a good sign (laughs).

You have known Sue Ennis for so long and you have written some incredible songs together [“Straight On,” “Bebe le Strange,” among others]. When did you actually realize that you could write songs together? 

We’d always jammed on guitars and we’d always had fun having listening parties and learning like Abbey Road in it’s entirety on guitars together with Ann. Then when Heart started to actually catch fire, she was in university at Willamette University in Oregon, and we were in the Seattle area and we could drive there to visit her. So we started talking, “Hey, don’t try to get a doctorate,” like in Grad School. “You need to be a songwriter cause we have so much fun trying to jam and write songs and think about lyrics. For the love of songs, we should become songwriters.” (laughs)

So we kept taking trips up to Willamette and spending weekends when she wasn’t in class or trying to study, which she always was, and we’d be like, “What can we write about? Let’s talk about that. Let’s get a title. Let’s get a chord structure.” So we started writing and we started to figure out that we were not too shabby at it. We started the next-day test, like, are we going to like this the next day, cause it seems really cool right now. So the next day we’d be like, “Wait, it might actually BE cool!” (laughs). Or the next day sometimes, “Nah, not so good.” So the next-day test was always the grade we’d give ourselves. So that’s how it started and along the way we’ve done quite a bit of that stuff.

What about for the new album?

I thought, why don’t I enlist my collaborator of many years to help me out with this album. She’s been for a few years now doing a teaching thing, teaching songwriting and she does another class about score music. So I was like, “Hey, why don’t we do something for me? It doesn’t necessarily have to fit the bill for Heart.” It’s a broader landscape there, because I’m obviously not the signature sound of Heart with my singing, but I love singing and I kind of approach singing as a player and I approach song structures a little differently normally than anything that would be right for Heart. And it just opened up the landscape quite a bit. 

Both of us had a lot of things kind of lying around. Like “You & Me,” the title song. She had a really beautiful little piece of music with words for her mother that she had written before called “Follow Me.” And I had written a poem after a dream about my mom called “You, Me & Gravity.” So we were like, “Hey, wait a minute, we have components. Let’s create a hybrid out of our components.” And that’s how it turned out to be “You & Me.” So things like that. I had some bits and pieces of melodic or guitar stuff and you know we’re always jamming on lyrics because it’s fun to have a really great friend who you can just like, “Okay, this is not very good but we can try it a different way, approach it a different way.” 

Even as far as my vocals on this, she was a good coach to me. She’d be like, “If you’re trying to make it sound like you’re pushing to make a powerful statement as a singer, it doesn’t feel like you. It feels like you’re trying to achieve an Ann moment. So why don’t you just say the story, just tell the story, in more of a personal conversational sort of way.” And I was like, “Oh okay, I get it.” And that really worked a couple of times for a couple of songs.

How were your moms alike or different?

They were very different. They knew each other but they were completely almost opposites. Sue’s mom, Pat, was very like a fastidious mother hen of a lady that was very kind of Better Homes & Gardens. I think she vacuumed the carpet completely off a couple of times (laughs). And my mom was very Marine Corps wife. She was a steel magnolia. She raised us with an iron fist and then she was the best nurse on the planet. She had to be mom and dad because our dad was gone in the wars a lot, sometimes for a year or so at a time. So she raised us as a mom and a dad and she was no nonsense and she could wield a power tool (laughs). Not big on vacuuming as much as like a power sander, you know (laughs).

“Walk Away” has this getting my life empowerment back type theme.

Yeah, that is exactly what that’s about. I think it’s kind of a universal story, unfortunately in some ways. But Sue and Ben Smith had this really cool groove of a song, like a groove that they’d sort of written together. I think Sue and I, in the past we had wanted to write a song about sort of taking responsibility for a universal situation that everyone at least once goes through in their relationships, where it’s a toxic relationship and you realize that you’ve enabled, you’re partly to blame for allowing this toxic relationship to continue. Then it’s the moment in which you realize you have to forgive yourself, forgive the other person, for allowing it to happen and completely walking away from it to save your own life, to save your own emotional life. So I think a lot of people could relate to those abusive or toxic type relationships, whether it’s a marriage or a friendship or a business partnership or whatever. I like that song for that reason. I think it describes it well.

Your rendition of “The Boxer” captures that original emotion that Simon & Garfunkel gave to it. What do you love in particular about that song?

First of all, I completely grew up playing that song. It’s in my DNA. When it first came out, it was on the radio all the time and I had to learn it and it was like a million situations of friends with guitars sitting around and we all would play that song. And actually, I pulled that one out for the last Heart tour because I knew it’s a song people love to sing along in the chorus. There’re no words to remember, it’s just lie-la-lie and you can just go for it.

I heard a story about Paul Simon recently about that song, that he had put that lie-la-lie in the chorus for a placeholder, that he was going to finish the words for it. But then when he listened back in the studio, he thought, why not keep that. Because the verse area is so completely almost a complex story full of layers of meaning, and then if the lie-la-lie just stays lie-la-lie, it’s even more appealing from the contrast of the verse to just open up in the chorus for something simple like that. Somebody told me in the management company, “Would you please do ‘The Boxer’ because it was so cool on the road.” So I said, “Yeah, I’ll do that” (laughs). 

But I was looking for a way to kind of update it and when I talked to Sammy Hagar about doing something, I actually had sent him another kind of rocker, and he was like, “You know, everybody would expect me to do a big rocker so what else could I do on your album?” I said, “Well, here’s an idea, what about ‘The Boxer.’” And he said, “I love that song!” Plus, he was a boxer so in the song now with him in the choruses bringing his big Sammy energy to the chorus, it turned out to be kind of a beautiful descriptive moment where you actually see the character of THE boxer. It’s almost like a cinematic, theatrical moment where you can see him in there doing the lie-la-lie and kind of punching the air. So I think it made the song different in a really good way.

You really brought that song to life, especially in the last verse.

I think that last verse is really depth-y. It’s like a boxer who gets slammed and hurt and bruised and beaten, “I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” but he still remains for whatever reason he’s fighting, he still continues to fight. I always think of Paul Simon after 9-11 when he sang that with firefighters lined up behind him. I teared up that time for sure.

You also cover Pearl Jam’s “Daughter.” 

I actually recorded that before for the purpose of an assignment to make a song for a film. It’s a film called I Am All Girls and I recorded that for the film initially because it’s a film about sex trafficking and it’s a true story about a girl who sort of comes back to get her predators, one in particular, I guess, and it’s a really cool film. When I recorded it, it was an anthem to those girls. It was actually not that long before the shutdown, so I was able to just put it on my album because I thought it sounded amazing and it’s really powerful, there is so much rage in it. There is a line in the song that says, “She holds the hand that holds her down,” which is so indicative of the horrific life a lot of these girls have to go through. And the Pearl Jam guys loved it when they heard it. I’m going to do a video with some of the footage from the film and stuff like that.

I read in your book [Kicking & Dreaming] that you wanted to be a mechanic. Where did that come from?

(laughs) Well, you know, I was kind of young at the time (laughs). I was thinking about what kind of job I could do, just to earn extra money. I tried to be a busboy. I went to a couple of restaurants and I said, “Could I be a busboy?” And they were like, “That’s not a girl’s job.” I just wanted to do something that would kind of be like an education in normalcy, like a real job, a down-to-earth kind of job. So I thought maybe go to a gas station so I went to a gas station and I said, “I’d like to learn to become a mechanic.” And they were like, “Sorry Lady, that’s not a job for a girl.” So I got turned away from menial work. I could have probably tried to be a seamstress, I guess. I tried but I never had a real job to save my life (laughs).

Tell us about “Party At The Angel Ballroom,” because that is such a fun track and you can definitely pick up Duff McKagan’s punk rock roots in there.

Right. I think it was when Petty passed away, which was sad, a lot of rock angels have passed and left us behind and I was kind of like, oh my God, they must be having some kind of party up there in the Angel Ballroom. Then I realized, wow, that’s kind of a cool title. And also, I had went to Taylor Hawkins’ studio and I sang a couple of things for him on his Get The Money album, which is really a cool album. Then later when I moved up to northern California and I was going to make this album, I said, “Hey Taylor, you got anything lying around I could jam or anything?” He said, “Yeah, me and Duff have this one jam so I’ll send it to you.” I kind of rearranged it a bunch and finished it for my album and it was kind of a cool thing because it’s a whimsical take on a very heavy topic. It makes it sort of like a La Dolce Vita cinematic moment.

What song in your career would you say was the furthest musically from who you are as an artist?

Well, I could say it would be one song that Mutt Lange wrote called “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You,” which of course was one of our biggest worldwide hits ever (laughs). But it was the most unlike Heart song of any songs, because it’s more like a country song. It just tells a story, “It was a rainy night, da-da-da.” But when we changed the gender around, cause it wasn’t written from a girl’s perspective, when we sang it like she was the woman who picked up the hitchhiker and had illicit sex and then a child later on in the story of the song, they banned it in Ireland, because it was a wanton woman who picked up a stranger and wound up having a child out of wedlock. So I think we were kind of like stoked that they banned it in Ireland (laughs), because at least it was a rebellious result of a song that sounded more like a safe country kind of a song.

“Dream Of The Archer” from Heart’s Little Queen album, the instrumentation on that is so pretty. Was that song conceived with mandolin in mind?

Absolutely, that was always going to be like an opus with mandolins. It started out with an intro part with me and then-guitar player Roger Fisher. We both played mandolin, well, I kind of showed him the mandolin, so we kind of worked out this cool song on mandolin, an instrumental song. Then we said, let’s make it into a whole song, which is very kind of a Tolkein, very Zeppelin-ish, kind of like “Battle Of Evermore.” We flushed it out into a fairy tale of a song that dealt with a lot of things about Zen In The Art Of Archery, which was a big book at the time, about when you try to reach your goal: if you’re trying you’re going to fail but if you just go on your instincts and your heart, that’s when you hit the bullseye. That was kind of the whole concept behind that song. That was one of my favorite Heart songs.

What song do you remember hearing where the lyrics really stood out to you? 

There are so many of those songs. A lot of Joni Mitchell, like “Hejira;” those lyrics are unbelievably beautiful, like only Joni Mitchell could write them. A lot of Stevie Wonder, like from his first couple of albums, like “All In Love Is Fair,” songs like that. But there are too many beautiful, lyrical songs to even name.

“The Dragon” was on your Roadcase Royale album and you’re revisiting it again on You & Me and that was originally written for Layne Staley. Did you bring it back for someone else in mind this time?

No, it’s sort of symbolic of a lot of people that can be vortexed into addiction. It’s kind of universal on that level for many people. But it was originally written for Layne and I always think of him whenever I sing it, because he was very indicative of so many addicts that are really beautiful people and sweet people who just have no chance against the dragon, you know, where they unfortunately ultimately end up. People like Chris Cornell, who I think of; people that don’t win that war. Andy Wood. There are so many, unfortunately so many.

You have a few bonus tracks. What originally compelled you to do “Fixing A Hole,” which is such an interesting choice.

I’ve always loved that song and it’s such an uplifting kind of look at when something’s wrong: “Hey, I know what’s wrong, there’s a hole in my roof and the rain’s coming in but all I got to do is fix it” (laughs). That’s a Paul McCartney thing, per se, right. Actually, one of my Seattle musician friends had asked me if I would sing a Beatles song for a benefit for out of work musicians around Seattle and he sent me the track and I sang it and we made a little video and stuff. Same with “Any Major Dude.” It was for a Seattle benefit, benefitting out of work musicians, so kind of the same process to do that. And the other one was “Bluebird.” Same deal but a different benefit to save one of the music spaces around Seattle, The Royal Room, I think it’s called. So those were just to raise money for musicians and musician venues to keep them afloat while nobody had work and things were trying to shut down all over the place. Those were just cool things that we did for local Seattle benefits.

You’re one of the lucky ones to have seen The Beatles in concert

Yeah, we got to see The Beatles play live in 1966 at the Seattle Coliseum. At the time, me and Ann had a little band with a couple girls from the choir that we would go and sing and play for different little parties and get-togethers, school functions and stuff. We were called the Viewpoints and our mom, being a great seamstress, we asked her in advance of the show to make us uniforms that were the same as The Beatles uniforms (laughs). She made us the khaki mandarin military button jackets. Of course, instead of pants we were wearing the khaki skirts with nylons and flats (laughs). But we came dressed as the foursome and we sat in not a good seat or anything but it was an amazing event. We had binoculars and there were a couple of opening bands who came out first that had local Top 40 hits on the radio. Then when there was a slight intermission and Mal Evans, the famous Beatles roadie, carried out Ringo’s kick drum with the Beatles logo on it, the place came completely unglued. It was like screams and it was lit up like daylight with all the flashbulbs everywhere. It really was an amazing thing to see.

Could you actually hear them?

Vaguely, yeah. You could sort of hear them. They didn’t really have a big PA system. They just had their small PA columns and their amps. I don’t even know if they had like monitors onstage or not. We wouldn’t have heard them at all without at least their amps and their monitors. It was no acoustic show, let’s put it that way, but it was so exciting.

Were you one of the screamy girls or were you eagle-eyed onto George’s guitar?

Oh, we were eagle-eyed and we were taking notes. We were studying their, you know, camaraderie and all that stuff, just watching and taking notes on how to be The Beatles. We wanted to BE The Beatles, not try to marry them (laughs).

Do you remember a show in your career where it was crazy on a similar level?

There have been a lot of Heart shows that were really wild and crazy. A lot of the big festivals were insane, like Cal Jam and Cal Jam II and Texxas Jam. There were so many acres and acres of people and relay towers. Like from the stage there’d be another relay tower that was broadcasting the show and then beyond that, yet another relay tower. And the sea of faces, you could not find the end of it. It was just so big. And those were really crazy shows. People were standing, there were no seats of course, and people were fainting in the heat, people were fighting. They’d hose them down with these huge hoses to keep them from fainting from the heat. I mean, The Beatles never did big festivals except for maybe Shea Stadium but it was still barricaded and seated areas. But there were so many different situations where we played and it was wild and people were screaming and crying and trying to jump onstage and sometimes people would throw like M-80’s toward the stage and it would explode like behind the stage or next to the stage and it’d be like, I couldn’t hear for a couple of seconds after that. I think with Heart though, it was much more of a fun for the whole family in general kind of audience. We usually generated really sweet people to come to our shows cause we weren’t like death metal or heavy metal. We were more poetic and more of a romantic yet heavy rocking band. I think we drew a less violent crowd overall. But we had those moments for sure.

What was the sexiest guitar you have ever seen?

Wow (laughs). I think it’s the one I played on the album. It’s my 1963 lake placid blue Telecaster. That’s my main squeeze right there. It just speaks to me on every level. It’s got all the original dirt still in there (laughs) and it makes it sound good, you know. I’ve played it for so long.

When did you get it?

I believe it was like in the late seventies and my guitar tech at the time was always on the lookout for great collectible guitars for me, on my behalf, and he picked up a few really nice ones that I purchased and that was one of them. When I play acoustic guitar, I play kind of aggressively, and that Tele, a Telecaster in general, it feels a little more like an acoustic, so you can actually kind of pound on it and it doesn’t go out of tune. A lot of guitars are a little more delicate and that’s not a delicate guitar (laughs). It’s a war horse, that guitar, so you can do anything on it. You can sound delicate with it but it can stand up to the abuse.

Right before you end your album with “4 Edward,” an instrumental, you have one of your original songs, “We Meet Again.”

That song was actually the first song that I put pen to paper to try to create a new original for the album. I was really channeling my college girl self, you know. Before I joined Heart, I was in university for about a year and a half trying to pick up some, you know, intellectual chops and stuff to bring to the band when I finally did join the band after that. Doing solo shows and just gathering experience and gathering my songwriting, gathering the inspiration with literature and songwriting and music theory and trying to bring it all together so I could bring good tools to the band when I did join the band. 

I was kind of channeling Paul Simon with that guitar part and trying to think of an image where there’s a traveler, kind of like “Hejira” by Joni Mitchell, like you’re traveling in a vehicle , you’re on a train, you’re heading to your homeland, in the rain, towards like northwest and how you look across the terrain and you’re seeing your life, seeing the landscapes and the horizon of your past and your lifetime and how you’re moving into whatever the future may hold. You’re traveling towards, because you’ve already lived through a lot of your life, traveling towards maybe what may be the last part of your life. So you’re looking forward to the river’s end where it goes to the sea. A lot of imagery. Also, the person that you found who is the love of your life, you’re kind of talking to them about getting all the way through, to committing to the entire journey to the very end, all the way to the river’s end, with them, committing to wherever you get to, to stick with it. I don’t know if that makes a lot of sense but (laughs).

Do you think the young teenaged Nancy would like the adult Nancy you have become?

(laughs) That’s a good question. I like that question. Instead of what would you tell your younger self, it’s do you think you would like your older self (laughs). I remember being my younger self, and even as a little kid, I had like that instinct, I felt very like I had a lot of meaning and love and compassion for my older self in advance. Because I knew I was a sensitive person and I knew my emotions, I knew I had something to give to other people and I kind of pledged to myself that I’m always going to keep who I am, even when I’m fifty (laughs), I want to still have the same feeling of the meaningful person I am today when it’s much further in the future. And I want to remember this moment when it gets there. So I’ve actually reminded myself time and time again, like during these landmarks of your life that go by, okay, remember when the kid said that to yourself? Yeah, I do, I’m still there (laughs). Those little reminders of your younger self encouraging your older self not to be jaded and not to give up or be too heartbroken about anything for too long.

And you have a show coming up in the summer.

Yeah, we’re doing a show with the Seattle Symphony on July 9th with some of the new stuff and some Heart stuff with my singer from Roadcase Royale, Liv Warfield. Then there is also a Heart tour on the books for Live Nation in 2022. So I think both of those things are going to be super exciting to do.

 

Portrait by Jeremy Danger; live photos by Amy Harris

Related Content

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Recent Posts

New to Glide

Keep up-to-date with Glide

Twitter