April 30, 2024
Heart's Nancy Wilson
The player is loading ...
00:00
00:00
00:00
Guitarist and songwriter Nancy Wilson is one half of the rock band Heart, along with her older sister Ann Wilson. Nancy and Ann have been the face of the band since the mid-70s. Heart’s first album, Dreamboat Annie, was released in 1976 right as the band was making traction opening for big acts like Rod Stewart and The Bee Gees. Soon their songs, like “Magic Man” and “Crazy On You,” started to take off in the States, and Heart quickly became a headlining act.
Nearly 50 years since their debut album, Heart has experienced career highs—like a string of chart-topping hits and an induction into the Rock N Roll Hall Of Fame—as well as their fair share of personal and professional adversity. Today Ann and Nancy remain steadfast in continuing Heart’s legacy. This month they embarked on a world tour—their first in five years.
To celebrate Ann and Nancy Wilson’s massive contribution to rock n roll history, we will feature conversations with both sisters over the next two weeks. Today we’ll hear Leah Rose talk to Nancy about how the popular drugs of the ‘70s and ‘80s influenced Heart’s sound. She also describes how being accepted by the musicians of Seattle’s grunge scene helped her overcome Heart’s fraught experience recording power ballads in the ‘80s. And she describes the lo-fi setup she used to score the soundtracks of her ex-husband Cameron Crowe’s hit movies: Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, and Jerry McGuire.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Heart songs HERE.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Guitarist and songwriter Nancy Wilson is one half of the rock band Heart, along with her older sister Anne Wilson. Nancy and Ann have been the face of the band since the mid seventies, when they started playing gigs around their home base in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Wilson sisters both migrated to Canada from Seattle, Washington to join a band member who was dodging the Vietnam draft. Heart's first album, Dreamboat Annie, was released in nineteen seventy six, right as a band was making traction opening for big acts like Rod Stewart and the Bee Gees. Soon, their songs like Magic Man and Crazy On You started to take off in the States, and Heart quickly became a headlining act. Nearly fifty years since the debut album, Heart has experienced career highs like a string of chart topping hits and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as their fair share of personal and professional adversity. Today, Ann and Nancy remain steadfast in continuing Heart's legacy. This month, they are embarking on a world tour, their first in five years, to celebrate Anna and Nancy Wilson's massive contribution to rock and roll history. Will feature conversations with both sisters over the next two weeks. Today, we'll hear Leo Rose talk to Nancy about how the popular drugs of the seventies and eighties influenced Heart's sound. She also describes how being accepted by the musicians of Seattle's grunge scene helped her overcome Heart's fraud experience recording power ballads in the eighties, and she describes the lo fi setup she used to score the soundtracks of her ex husband Cameron Crowe's hit movies Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, and Jerry Maguire. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: I'm justin Ritchman.
00:02:02
Speaker 1: Here's Lea Rose's conversation with Heart's Nancy Wilson.
00:02:06
Speaker 3: I was looking at your upcoming tour dates and I know this is you know, probably nothing new to you, but it has been five years since you've been on the road. Yeah, I guess with this sort of like an arena tour. Yes, I didn't realize it was five months long.
00:02:23
Speaker 2: Well yeah, yeah.
00:02:24
Speaker 3: Does that sound like a long time to you or is that just part of life and you readjust.
00:02:30
Speaker 2: Right now what I've heard. The last I heard the last Heart show is December fifteenth, so it's been extended. I think it's been extended through another running through Canada. I love Canada.
00:02:44
Speaker 3: Though, good old Canada for heart.
00:02:47
Speaker 2: Good Old Canada for Heart. I know it's our other home, you know, but there's breaks between. Do you do about twenty shows or thirty shows? Then you go home for maybe two weeks, so you can, you know, answer you're mail.
00:03:03
Speaker 3: You know, what sort of comforts do you set up for yourself at this point when you're going out for that long?
00:03:10
Speaker 2: I think I could write a book about it. There's a whole survival kit really of like comfort zone things and practical survival things that you need to kind of have with you, and skills that you develop when you're not at home. So like you take one container that has sharpies, scissors, gaffer's tape, some kind of string, and then you know, some of those alligator clips and a pillowcase so if the vent in the hotel room is blasting cold air on you, you can clip the pillowcase to the vent, take a call. There's stuff like that, and an alligator clip also will close the curtains when its broad daylight comes away too early in your room. Oh, hair clamps also suffice. And then you if you have a stinky room, you run the shower with the tub closed so the water gathers the hot water with this complimentary shampoo who were on in the bath with the shower moist in the air and scent the room at the same time.
00:04:30
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:04:31
Speaker 2: And if you get an extra pile of towels, you can do all your laundry in cold water in the tub, bring them out, rinse them in the tub, ring them out again, and do the towel dance is what I call when you lay the clothes and fold the towels and do the dance on the towels, and then hang the clothes in the room. And if you have a balcony, even better because then they'll go fast. They'll drive faster. Like college stuff, all the college stuff all works. You know, if you ever went to university, which I did, all of that stuff, like one little hot pot is pretty much all. You had no refrigerator, you know, Yeah, you had the window that kept things cooled outside, you know, stuff like that.
00:05:16
Speaker 3: I listened to your audio book Kicking and dreaming And it was so great because you read the book. You and Anne read the book. There was one section where you were talking about meeting Paul McCartney. Uh huh, and he was on stage talking to somebody else, and then I guess you and Anne went up and started talking to him, and he had this glazed over look in his eye that I think Anne said reminded her of just what happens when you're on the road for a long period of time.
00:05:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah.
00:05:47
Speaker 3: How do you get past that feeling?
00:05:50
Speaker 2: How do you deglaze yourself? Yeah?
00:05:53
Speaker 3: How do you manage that when you're just in the middle of a long tour?
00:05:57
Speaker 2: Well, you know, sleep is the key to the universe, for one thing. You try to find quiet places and moments to regroup and re gather because there's there can be a lot of momentum and dramatic political drama inside of the power structures that are traveling with you. You know what usually happens on a big rock tour with a lot of travel, a lot of finance involved, is me and Anne are like in the eye of the hurricane, where it's quiet and calm and peaceful together and our humors intact and our initial relationship just it's just like completely safe, but everything else is swirwing like the Dickens. It's like the Twister movie where you see cows go by and you know, there's go, there's the kitchen sing, there's a house over there. You know, just the emotional luggage that you kind of have to navigate through the baggage and the chaos that can surround you. But we do like to have a wellness room because we're gonna be in lots of arenas which are basically locker rooms, yeah, which you know, so you're gonna need something that smells good in there, like some lavender spray or lavender spray, some incense, and some good thick yoga mats and some music and turning the fluorescence off and some put some candles on and have a massage table in one room and then have the workout stuff like the TRX and the free weights and the pilates machine in the other room so you can strengthen or you can you know, go get bodywork, even if it's once in a while, you know, just try to keep strong and keep centered with it.
00:07:56
Speaker 3: Last time you went out, I saw there's a couple of dates on this tour with Deaf Leopard in Journey and last time you went out with them, it sounds like Deaf Leopard were just like party animals to an extent that you weren't expecting because at that point they were in their fifties and it sort of took you a bash. Are you expecting more of that this tour?
00:08:18
Speaker 2: They're older guys now, Like everybody has to slow down their party activity, you know at a certain point. I mean, for instance, you too have really slowed down because I've partied with you too. One time it was like whoa, where are what cities we land in on the private jet? Oh wait, you thought it was Paris, No, it's Vegas. You know, like stuff was going on. Everybody was drinking like fish and smoking like sex. But you know, you can't live like that when you're especially if you're a little bit older. So you know, those dance cards have been full for a while, so we I think even I don't know, even def Lepper, I mean, you can't actually go out and play and do it well if you're just destructed from a party, right. I mean, art actually plays everything live. We don't run tapes, as they say. Our show doesn't come out out of a box like most people do these days, which is not a just mental comment on my part, but I guess we're just kind of old school that way. We just really want to feel the authenticity of the moment that only happens that one particular time and there's nothing sort of canned going on around it, you know, And even at the expense of coming off really fallible and really human at times where your voice doesn't exactly work right or you squeak, you know, or you can't quite hit that note, or or your fingers don't work too well or your finger's hurt or whatever it is. You know, we just do it like that because that's how we know how to do it, you know. Like as a rock fan, if I go see the Eagles, for example, and you could tell some of the background vocal are sweetened, you know, or if you go see Paul McCartney and some of it's a little bit extra, you know, like the album sounding and stuff like that, it doesn't really matter, you know, there's no like shame in that. I think all that really matters is how beloved these songs are and the experience that people get from going all the way out of their way to go and see you play those songs that they love.
00:10:38
Speaker 3: Are you the type of fan if you go see someone like Paul McCartney, since you've loved the Beatles for so long, do you want to hear him play all the hits, all the early Beatles stuff, Wing stuff. Do you kind of get a little bit disgruntled if he starts to play a new song? Or because you're also an artist and a performer, do you totally get that and are you over supportive of that that new music moment?
00:11:04
Speaker 2: I tend that's a good question. I tend to be really overly supportive of anyone that you know, puts a toe into the new material column, you know, in a live show setting, especially when they have so many beloved songs to do. And I went and saw Paul on his eightieth roofday in San Francisco, and it was an incredibly good show. And you know, he's ever the Paul. He's dependable as the sun will rise. He's a genius songwriter. But there's so many songs that over a very actually pretty short period of time that became such landmark songs, and even with Wings as well as with the Beatles, but when he does something like Molofkin Tire or something more rare like Happiness in the Homeland or you know, love in Song or you know Tug of War. I mean, I know all all of its songs deep cuts. So that's kind of what I'm concentrating a little bit on with this new lineup of players in this band. We call Heart a couple of deep cuts, you know, to put in our back pocket to keep the set list from being always predictably the same, right, even for ourselves, you know. Yeah, living on the edge, it's like, okay, let's pull this one out. Oh my god, how does that go? Again? Let's see how does that go?
00:12:35
Speaker 3: Yeah?
00:12:36
Speaker 2: You know, if you're worth your salt as a player, a singer, songwriter, player, I think you can pretty much get through even if you mess up a little bit. You can have fun with it and make it work. And people kind of appreciate the imperfections, even maybe a little bit more than they appreciate something that's absolutely perfect.
00:13:01
Speaker 3: I was curious about your decision to play rhythm guitar rather than lead guitar, and if gender had anything to do with that decision early on, and if you still feel like, yeah, I'm a rhythm guitar player to the death.
00:13:17
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I've been known to step out play little bit of lead here and there on records and in live settings, and I toss in little I don't know, shred moments here and there. But I'm more like a Pete Townsend at my center. I'm an accompanist as a songwriter, so I approached my playing like a songwriter. So I'm accompanying the lyrics and the melody for the song. So it's the structure of the song that interests me more than the embellishing and kind of the frosting on top, you know. So for me, that's the meat and potatoes. That's the real, you know, essence. And you can add all the extra stuff, which is fun to do. And I'm not a horrible league player. I just don't do it that often because I'm more a building block song person in the way of play. But yeah, but I've always thought as a woman playing guitar, there's so many women right now that are younger women coming out that are just shredders, like Grace Bauers for example. I don't know if you've seen her on like Instagram or whatever, but She is kind of a Clapton type shredder. She's a blues player who plays instead of for the quantity of notes, she plays for the quality of the expression of the notes that she chooses that sound more like sentences than you know, show off stuff.
00:14:57
Speaker 3: I was surprised when I listened back to Dreamboat Annie, which is turning fifty.
00:15:01
Speaker 2: Next year next year.
00:15:03
Speaker 3: There's so much musical interplay on the songs. It's not just straightforward at all, and there's a lot of communication between the two guitars.
00:15:12
Speaker 2: Right.
00:15:12
Speaker 3: Was that something that was intentional from the beginning or did that just happen in jams?
00:15:18
Speaker 2: Well, I guess I would say both. I mean all of the above. It's intentional to try to have a dialogue with another guitar player, a rhythm and a lead player, which you hear a lot of that on Dreambani the album. And at that point it was Howard Lease and Roger Fisher, two really great players that I got to sort of cut my teeth, you know, my rock and roll live club band kind of recording first recording session teeth with the era we came from to the late sixties. By this point, we're releasing our first album in the mid seventies and seventy five, so we had all of that imprint From the late sixties, the Mind expanded sort of epic length songs and you know, tales of great Ulysses kind of stuff out there, and you know, like sticks and Rush and yes, you know and Heart. A lot of conceptualizing going on and yeah, you know, significance and depthy symbolism and stuff like that before cocaine, you know, before it cut all ego driven later.
00:16:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to say that feels very LSD esque.
00:16:41
Speaker 2: Very mind expanded from that era. So we were really starting out with the first album, I think.
00:16:49
Speaker 4: Really naive and doggedly determined, workmanlike about getting something very important recorded onto a vinyl disc, you know, and this might be our only chance to be heard.
00:17:06
Speaker 2: And it was really cool because it worked. I mean, just over my last weekend, I was having a birthday weekend at this beautiful beach in Oregon on the Oregon coast with my friend Sue Ennis that we did a whole bunch of songwriting with. And we have a project We've been digging through old cassettes for an old CDs for like a rarity project that We're just digging out with gems and morsels and hysterical little bits and song pieces and songwriting jams that turned into other songs that would be familiar someday. Stuff like that, and we had the blast of all blasts. But listening to a lot of those cassette tapes, you could hear Soul of the Sea forming, You could hear you know, even It Up, the beginnings of Even It Up coming together. And also we found the mother load of like Heart when they were called before I joined Heart, when they were called hocus Pocus in a club called oil Can Harry's in Vancouver. Received there's these real surreal tapes that the sound man used to get of the live performance to listen back and critique from like a ball team, you know. So yeah, so there's like a bunch of covers that we used to do, you know, a bunch of David Bowie's songs, a bunch of deep purple. It's like, oh my god. It reminded me how hard those club days were because you really had a lot of time to fill and probably close to you know, I don't know, five hours of music and banter. You really had a lot of time to fill and entertainment to provide.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: We have to take a quick break and then we back with more from Nancy Wilson and Leah Rose. We're back with Lea Rose and Nancy Wilson.
00:19:16
Speaker 3: I was asking Anne about the time in the book you talked about there's a period of time where you both would hang out with Stevie Nicks. Yeah, especially in the seventies when the big Fleetwood Mac albums were coming out. I was just curious about the relationship between Heart and Fleetwood Mac, and it sounds like you came together more in the eighties to hang out.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were kind of happening right before us, kind of as Hart was just starting to tiptoe into the scene, and they already had rumors out there, and we were just trying so hard to make an album and get out there and get a tour or whatever, and they were all over the radio, and you know, I felt so jealous of that band because there were two women in it. It sounded so good together, and they had the acoustic guitar kind of thing that I felt like I was bringing a lot of into our band. They kind of had it already, you know, like something we were trying to capture. They had already captured it. So I was really like, damn it, what makes us so different now? You know? But we did sound very different. I mean a lot of it's Anne's voice, you know, very signature. You know, the muscle and the power that she possesses and the way she sings is completely its own things. So lucky for us we had Anne, not just it know was soft rock. We had hard rock, so we could rock very hard and as quietly as well. So we probably had a lot more maybe versatility or something.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was surprised. I asked Anne about her voice and she I asked her when she first realized that her voice was so powerful, and she said that she didn't think voice was very powerful.
00:21:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, her confidence is hard for her to she's she's hard on herself. But when she was a kid, a kid kid, and I was maybe nine or eight, we were all bunch of Hams, always singing harmonies into the family and you know, she would do ethel mermon. She would do this no business like show and she could just build it like this little kid and our parents would be like girls, girls, come on down the stairs, you know, and your ethel murmon. So She would just you know, blow the people's minds in the living room, and she just had this facility, you know, she just had these has these pipes that a few people have. It's God given.
00:22:02
Speaker 3: Do you think of both your gift as a songwriter, a player, a writer AND's voice and gift as a writer. Where does that come from in your mind?
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Oh? Well, I think the gift, the music gift comes from our parents and our grandparents and our aunts and our uncles. Our grandpa was the Irish tenor in the local church choir, and both of our mom and dad were met in choir when they decided they loved each other. And my dad was a singer in a barbershop quartet, and my mom was in various ensemble choirs and big choirs, and all of us grew up with choirs and choirs and harmony, singing in the car on the way to grandma's. You know, I think it's generational in our family and the love of music and listening to music and Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. We always had a record player, you know, and we learned a lot of albums by Heart and Harry Bellefonte, Peggy Lee and Judy Garland and all of those great singers from that era. We were always singing along. Every Christmas. We had the same like Big Benjamin Britain Corral going on, and we'd sing in the house and decorate the tree singing in the house, you know. And you hear about those families, I guess we were one of them. Like the Beg's family. They were all singing the Jacksons. So it comes really naturally. It comes very honestly to both of us, you know, from the inside out.
00:23:48
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and you can feel that too.
00:23:50
Speaker 2: No, it's true. I feel driven by it still, whether or not something's happening or going on, or successful or not successful. I feel driven to do music and create music, write music, play music. And it's like a destiny, you know, feeling of destiny because it's what your cellular memory knows.
00:24:16
Speaker 3: When you talk about the eighties now, or when you think about the eighties and the first formation of Heart started to sort of disintegrate and new players came in. You were signed to Capitol Records. They started bringing songwriters in. How devastating was that to you and Anne at the time.
00:24:37
Speaker 2: Well, we were kind of victims of longevity in a certain way because the styles changes and you wanted to not change that much. The mind expanded perspective was turning into a cocaine perspective, which was a little more money ego sort of driven. Therefore, you know, a stable of LA's hit songwriters were employed in tandem with these record companies to create the formulaa hits that were expected of the time and those big power ballads and you know, hairband music and so so we were like reluctantly kind of going along for survivals reasons and writing our own stuff meanwhile, you know, but we were kind of irritated with the whole atmosphere of that. The weather system just felt wrong to us, you know, around all of that image making type of stuff, because we were cool, kind of apple cheek girls from Seattle without makeup when we first started, and then it was all about the artifice and what you can wear and how much your jacket's going it's going to cost as much as a car. You know, like that's not important. It was never important to us, and so we muddled through pretty good in the eighties because we got a couple of really gorgeous songs out of that time, like like these Dreams and Alone, What About Love, and a few more. They're just gorgeous, well written, structured pieces of music that we still enjoy doing today, you know. So if that's the booty that we snuck out of the eighties, then it's well worth it.
00:26:26
Speaker 3: How have you changed the arrangements on some of those songs? Have you tried to take them away from their power ballad beginnings?
00:26:34
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, A good song you could do almost any way. I mean you could do Alone on a ukulele, you know, because it's a good song and it has a good shape to it, whether or not it's in a big format, a bombastic sounding format, or if it's just an acoustic guitar or piano. With these Dreams in particular, it's an oddball song. This changed different keys. I played it on mandolin, we do it with keyboards and percussion, and then we do it just acoustic on it, different keys, different arrangements. You know. The song's really flexible that way. And Alone we've sort of we merged Alone into what About Love at the guitar solo, which really worked well. So there's just ways to yeah, just try new versions out so that you're not so it's not just the album, you know.
00:27:34
Speaker 3: Was These Dreams originally written for Stevie Nicks.
00:27:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, Verdie Topin told me that once. He said, actually, Stevie Nicks rejected this song first, and they thought about it for her because if it's very diatheanous and mysterious, and you know, it's very gauzy sounding, and she rejected it because she was not taking outside material, thank you very much. And a lot of people were at the time and she wasn't. And I respect that a lot that she wasn't doing that. And it's not easy to write a song that fits the fashion of the current radio program either. So we gave, you know, we gave a lot of songs a good try. When we were I was at the beach with Sue listening to cassettes. There were some real turkeys, I mean, a lot of really bombastic ballad stranges of the Wold. You know. It's like, you know, like a bunch of very righteous sounding marching songs, kind of either marching rock songs or bombastic ballads with a lot of gated echo on the snare trum.
00:29:00
Speaker 5: We were like, oh, we us I think are head and shite because we were we were obviously trying really hard to keep up with the stable of la songwriter.
00:29:16
Speaker 2: Like the formulaic stuff is what we never could get right, you know. So the biggest global hit song was All I Want to Do Is make Love to You by Mutt Lang. Right. We recorded it and it was a huge smash and it was all over the world. Oh, I remember it was banned in Ireland, you know, because of the reverse sexism of it. But we were kind of proud of the fact that it was banned in Ireland. That's just the one that just never felt like a heart song exactly. It's a great track. It sounds genius on the radio, but it was never for Anne as a lead singer too, who has to sell what she's talking about in those lyrics of the song. It's really kind of more like a country story song. It's more like that. Yeah, it's not a real rock song per se.
00:30:13
Speaker 3: And I know Hart used to jam with a lot of musicians off stage and you can together have parties and sometimes at Ann's house later in Seattle, and it really reminded me of the stories of your family early on when you would have the hoot Nannies together, right, you know, totally were there any jams from that early era or any musicians that you've played with that really stand out.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: Definitely one of my favorite moments of coming back out of the eighties back to Seattle in the early nineties with our tail between our legs basically, you know, having been kind of gristed for the MTV mill there and the Seattle explosion was really cool. Suddenly it was really good music and guitars were back again, and all the layer cake production was blasted out of the water, like you know, smells like teen Spirit was like it. That was the flash mob moment in the culture where the eighties was definitely over, just instantly over, and you know, like eighties kind of power ballot bands that had a number one hit the week before were dropped from their label that day. You know, it was just that that exact like it was a surgical strike of rock and roll into the culture that made that happen. It was so so such a relief to us after coming out of that. And we had a party at Ann's house after we all kind of met each other because one of my oldest friends was managing Pearl Jam. He managed them forever. My friend Kelly Curtis still my best friend, and they all got together at some of the house around Andy Woods, who had just had odd from Mother Love Pone, who are then going to find Eddie Vedder and become pro jam So the whole community came together and we showed up to meet everyone kind of at this one big party, and we brought all of our dogs and everybody was crying and laughing and petting dogs and playing guitars. And then the next time we got together was at Ann's house and I ended up jamming with Jerry Cantrell, like cross legged in a corner and She's like, how I play the beginning of Mister all Wind? And I'm like, okay, that was like the best words I could have heard out of somebody that cool asking me that at that moment, because I got to feel cool again, like yeah, as like a musician should be able to feel in their hometown and not shamed by the new generation of people pushing back against the hair bands of the eighties and so so you know, that meant everything met the world to me and we're still tight. As a matter of fact, Stone Gossard in Petal Time he actually ended up buying a house from Anne at the beach in Oregon that I was just at last weekend, and the and Sue Mines were blown like we were here in our twenties writing Barracuda stuff, you know, and listening through the history of us doing that there in this beautiful location where we always used to go for ultimate hideout. So it was really an amazing time to come back to Seattle in the nineties and then be so well brought into the fold like that. It meant the world.
00:34:01
Speaker 3: I loved in the book. You were saying that Seattle musicians they won't bullshit you. If they don't like something, they'll tell you. They're not just going to kind of kiss up to you because you're already established. They'll say like, no, actually that kind of sucked.
00:34:16
Speaker 2: No, that's really true. They're not looking to be anti everything either. They're being honest. And it's a great thing about that community. That missed community in Seattle. I mean, people in program are really truly friends. They are there for each other. Kelly would Curtis would take his office employees and the band all out on retreats out of the Oregon coast, oh and stay at those same places where we used go right, and just get in small groups and talk about everybody and how things are going, and really communicate with each other about what can we do better? How can I make you feel better? I don't know. I just still feel really close to the people from Seattle in that particular way, because you can really tell the truth to each other other and you're not just smiling whatever.
00:35:13
Speaker 3: You know.
00:35:14
Speaker 1: After this last break, we'll be back with more from Nancy Wilson. We're back with the rest of Lea Rose's conversation with Nancy Wilson.
00:35:26
Speaker 3: When you started to pivot and work on film scores with Cameron Crowe and you worked on Almost Famous, how much of your experience was used in that movie? Was a lot of it? Like direct source material for the movie?
00:35:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, most of the Hearts played most of the sound of the score. Music for Almost Famous is me playing everything. So I played you know, percussion and keyboards, and I played hurdy gurdy, a little bit of you know, synthesizer, piano, guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, and vocals, you know as atmosphere, and I really had a blast doing that. I actually had a couple of musical instrumental pieces i'd recorded along the way, one in particular, called the Queue, ended up being called Deflower the Kid. So there was a piece of music that I'd already recorded just as a piece for myself for a different project that fit perfectly into the scene where with the William Miller characters being deflowered by the band aids in a hotel room in slow motion. So it actually worked out very well. It's like they cut to the song, so it worked really perfectly for that one scene, the whole scene, and I had a few little bits and pieces scraps of music sitting around it I threw into the mix. But I recorded a lot of it just on a little cassette stuffed into a tiny Costco TV player with really good like Noyman microphones at my friends my friend's house, you know, no no soundproofing, nothing, just very low fi but close enough so that you couldn't really hear the garbage trucks outside.
00:37:32
Speaker 3: You know.
00:37:32
Speaker 2: So so Jerry Maguire was done like that. Almost famous was done on the pretty much really low fly by like that. My first ever movie session, like which scared the shit out of me, was for for say anything. Anne Dudley was the score artist on that, So she was really nice to me. It was like I don't know how to read. I mean I learned, but I don't remember how to read, and so it's like, just show me how it goes my ear and I'll just play it. So I played, you know, guitar parts for that in a scoring session for my first time ever. And then the next thing I did was Jerry Maguire by myself. Wow, with the Costco TV.
00:38:18
Speaker 3: What an incredible new experience to have at that point in your career, still in music, still making music, but now by yourself. Yeah, such a different way to make music.
00:38:32
Speaker 2: So different. Well, I had a really good music editor, Carl Caller, that I did a lot of that stuff with for years, and he was really a good translator for me to know how to approach it, like because he would be able to take something I'd done and edit it together to fit the screen. So I was not encumbered by what was on picture and played a picture very often, just took for that those five seconds or whatever. But you know, we got really experimental when we did Vanilla Sky. There's some really crazy stuff that we did in that together. There's one called Elevator Beat where the Tom Cruise character is going up the elevator at the end before he jumps off the building, relives his life as he's falling. I went to a flea market, the Pasadena flea Market, and I found these old vinyl discs that you could play on home entertainment keyboard machines. You would certain a disc and it would play the groovy beat that you could play along with on your keyboard, your your home entertainment organs. Wow, so the Casio maybe, yes, yes, so really analogue, scratchy old albums that people would like.
00:39:57
Speaker 6: D you know, it would have like do you know, little little groove beats or like you turn it over, would be like.
00:40:11
Speaker 2: A shoff with the flutes right there. And so then you could tape it and run the tape backwards and have this crazy ass insanity sounding thing that you could also play forward stuff too, stuff like that. So I thought it was Brian Wilson there for a minute, and you know, or the Beatles on drugs, you know, And we just tried everything like that On Vanilla Sky. I was clearing out my garage, throwing stuff into a garbage scan and I recorded the sound of big flanks and clunks and planks going into the garbage can and used it as a rhythm track for Vanilla Sky where he's walking through the streets with his mask.
00:41:00
Speaker 3: On stuff that was so eerie.
00:41:03
Speaker 2: So it's like crazy stuff, you know.
00:41:06
Speaker 3: Did you have a lot of influence over the stories of the movies as well?
00:41:11
Speaker 2: Well? With Kevin writing scripts, he was always writing, rewriting and rewriting again and reading out loud for dialogue and just for the feel of how it sounds and what it feels like. So yeah, I did a lot of responding, and I made a lot of notes, gave a lot of notes, you know, a sentence here, a sentence there that might land in a funny, cool way, And so I kind of worked a little bit on some of the dialogue mainly. And it's a lot like songwriting, especially a writer like Camera Crow. He writes with music in his head, So he's writing his scenes like songs in a lot of ways where he's working toward a song that's going to be in the scene or or they're going to have, you know, a feeling of a song that they're going to act the scene too, that's playing on set, even if you don't have it in the movie later stuff like that. So it's all steeped in music, and the cadence of the dialogue should sound musical. Yeah. Yeah.
00:42:24
Speaker 3: Did you have any experiences on set with the actors once you got to the point where the movie was actually being filmed.
00:42:32
Speaker 2: My most memorable wildest one was on Almost Famous when Billy Krudip was playing the rock star on Acid of the scene where he goes to the kids party and it's a really funny part, and they were about to film the part where he's up on the roof going I'm a golden God, you know, and he said, so, Nancy, did you ever take LSD? And I was like, yes, I did. He does tell me what it's like, because he was about to go do this scene like right after that, and I said, well, it's kind of like you're like your nerves are all kind of sparks coming out at the ends of your fingers, and your head feels like an opening observatory where you're starting to see the universe and the stars and you feel kind of elevated, like you're part of everything and you're part of God and love all of the same time. So so he kind of went up. He kind of went out there and he sort of exactly did what I just said said. If you look at it today, you'll see like you can almost see sparks coming out of his fingertips. It's electrified.
00:43:50
Speaker 3: Yes, that must be so interesting to have the opportunity to talk to an actor and see them just turn it on.
00:43:58
Speaker 2: I know, I have so much respect for that. I tried to act a couple of times. It really did not go well for me because, you know, I know how to put myself in another like musical persona kind of way, but like just walking and talking is that to me is so foreign. I don't know how to not be who I am, you know, right to be someone else.
00:44:24
Speaker 3: Did you ever see Tom Cruise on set acting? I imagine he then he should be really fantastic to watch.
00:44:30
Speaker 2: He was fantastic. He's a fantastic human being. I mean, his eyes are kind of like headlights. You know, He's just full of this light that comes out of him. And I don't know what it is. I mean, maybe it's scientology. I don't know, but it's it's positive if it works for him. Obviously it really does. And he's a sweetheart, and you know he kisses your mom when he meets your mom, and she's like, you know, she's a flutter and he's just the nicest human being.
00:45:01
Speaker 3: I wanted to hear about your experience around the time you started working on film scores and you Heart for a small amount of time, and then you had the experience of going and seeing Heart play and being in the audience and seeing and perform. What was that like for you to witness her as an audience member?
00:45:22
Speaker 2: That was really actually amazing for me to see that. I mean, I never left the band. I was taking a sabbatical, you know, kind of trying to start my family period of time that I was always going to come back to the band, just so that's real clear. So when Anne came to LA, I went and saw her at a cool club somewhere in town, and I was like, I don't want to, oh, you know, I don't want to go try to go up on stage or do anything with you, because I just I've never got to be a spectator and not stand next to you on the stage. So I sat up in the audience, you know, trying to disappear as hard as I could not be there and just be the lie on the wall and see this amazing singer. It's like she good. You know, she's such a good singer. Like I never I'm so usually standing there concentrating on the part I'm playing in a harmony that's coming up, or the other thing that's gonna happen next to just watch her sing. It's like Jesus, she's like one of the greats. This all done.
00:46:34
Speaker 3: What was the deciding factor this time to go back on tour now.
00:46:39
Speaker 2: Well, there was kind of a natural break over the last since twenty nineteen was our last big tour. You know, there was a lot of political shuffle and bustle and scuffle and it was hard to get or putting back together as far as like who owns what and who makes what decisions and what is hard exactly and yeah, you know who's in it, and so a bunch of really boring, unnecessary logistical flex kind of stuff. And you know, after twenty sixteen there was that break happened too because you know, obvious things that we thank god it's a long time ago now, but just stupid stuff that's inside the family. It was unnecessary, a negative stuff. We had to try to get over that first and then Once we got over that, we went out on to the twenty nineteen tour and that was a really hugely successful tour, but there were still more I don't know, drama.
00:47:47
Speaker 3: To work out.
00:47:48
Speaker 2: So we're back again five years later. Unfortunately it's a lot late later. I mean, we'd kind of ready to go out for quite a while. But you know, I've got a trainer, I'm getting strong, I keep my strength up, and I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be fun and really really and I love playing with my sister. I really like being next to her on a rock stage, and you know, while we can, it's a good time to do it.
00:48:19
Speaker 3: So do you think you'll do another album?
00:48:22
Speaker 2: Well, I've been writing songs with Sue and one of them we're doing in Heart now called roll the Dice. It's a new Heart song. So you know, there's a couple of other songs that might kind of come out of it. But right now, these days, it's more about one song at a time than an albums. But I would love to do more songs with Art for art, but first the tour.
00:48:48
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, I have such a great time on the tour. I hope all goes well. People are going to go crazy and be so happy to see you both so well.
00:48:55
Speaker 2: I'm going to have my stash of Gaffer's tape and my scissors stuff and the clips.
00:49:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, your whole kid, the kit.
00:49:04
Speaker 2: I've got the kit ready to go.
00:49:05
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for talking today. It's been so much fun.
00:49:08
Speaker 2: Thank you. Really great to talk to you two, and very thorough.
00:49:15
Speaker 1: Thanks to Nancy Wilson of Heart. Stay tuned next week to hear from our sister and We'll see You. Can hear all of our favorite Heart songs on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tollery. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by any Eats. I'm justin Richmond.
Speaker 1: Pushkin. Guitarist and songwriter Nancy Wilson is one half of the rock band Heart, along with her older sister Anne Wilson. Nancy and Ann have been the face of the band since the mid seventies, when they started playing gigs around their home base in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Wilson sisters both migrated to Canada from Seattle, Washington to join a band member who was dodging the Vietnam draft. Heart's first album, Dreamboat Annie, was released in nineteen seventy six, right as a band was making traction opening for big acts like Rod Stewart and the Bee Gees. Soon, their songs like Magic Man and Crazy On You started to take off in the States, and Heart quickly became a headlining act. Nearly fifty years since the debut album, Heart has experienced career highs like a string of chart topping hits and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as well as their fair share of personal and professional adversity. Today, Ann and Nancy remain steadfast in continuing Heart's legacy. This month, they are embarking on a world tour, their first in five years, to celebrate Anna and Nancy Wilson's massive contribution to rock and roll history. Will feature conversations with both sisters over the next two weeks. Today, we'll hear Leo Rose talk to Nancy about how the popular drugs of the seventies and eighties influenced Heart's sound. She also describes how being accepted by the musicians of Seattle's grunge scene helped her overcome Heart's fraud experience recording power ballads in the eighties, and she describes the lo fi setup she used to score the soundtracks of her ex husband Cameron Crowe's hit movies Almost Famous, Vanilla Sky, and Jerry Maguire. This is broken record liner notes for the digital age.
00:02:00
Speaker 2: I'm justin Ritchman.
00:02:02
Speaker 1: Here's Lea Rose's conversation with Heart's Nancy Wilson.
00:02:06
Speaker 3: I was looking at your upcoming tour dates and I know this is you know, probably nothing new to you, but it has been five years since you've been on the road. Yeah, I guess with this sort of like an arena tour. Yes, I didn't realize it was five months long.
00:02:23
Speaker 2: Well yeah, yeah.
00:02:24
Speaker 3: Does that sound like a long time to you or is that just part of life and you readjust.
00:02:30
Speaker 2: Right now what I've heard. The last I heard the last Heart show is December fifteenth, so it's been extended. I think it's been extended through another running through Canada. I love Canada.
00:02:44
Speaker 3: Though, good old Canada for heart.
00:02:47
Speaker 2: Good Old Canada for Heart. I know it's our other home, you know, but there's breaks between. Do you do about twenty shows or thirty shows? Then you go home for maybe two weeks, so you can, you know, answer you're mail.
00:03:03
Speaker 3: You know, what sort of comforts do you set up for yourself at this point when you're going out for that long?
00:03:10
Speaker 2: I think I could write a book about it. There's a whole survival kit really of like comfort zone things and practical survival things that you need to kind of have with you, and skills that you develop when you're not at home. So like you take one container that has sharpies, scissors, gaffer's tape, some kind of string, and then you know, some of those alligator clips and a pillowcase so if the vent in the hotel room is blasting cold air on you, you can clip the pillowcase to the vent, take a call. There's stuff like that, and an alligator clip also will close the curtains when its broad daylight comes away too early in your room. Oh, hair clamps also suffice. And then you if you have a stinky room, you run the shower with the tub closed so the water gathers the hot water with this complimentary shampoo who were on in the bath with the shower moist in the air and scent the room at the same time.
00:04:30
Speaker 3: Wow.
00:04:31
Speaker 2: And if you get an extra pile of towels, you can do all your laundry in cold water in the tub, bring them out, rinse them in the tub, ring them out again, and do the towel dance is what I call when you lay the clothes and fold the towels and do the dance on the towels, and then hang the clothes in the room. And if you have a balcony, even better because then they'll go fast. They'll drive faster. Like college stuff, all the college stuff all works. You know, if you ever went to university, which I did, all of that stuff, like one little hot pot is pretty much all. You had no refrigerator, you know, Yeah, you had the window that kept things cooled outside, you know, stuff like that.
00:05:16
Speaker 3: I listened to your audio book Kicking and dreaming And it was so great because you read the book. You and Anne read the book. There was one section where you were talking about meeting Paul McCartney. Uh huh, and he was on stage talking to somebody else, and then I guess you and Anne went up and started talking to him, and he had this glazed over look in his eye that I think Anne said reminded her of just what happens when you're on the road for a long period of time.
00:05:46
Speaker 2: Yeah, oh yeah.
00:05:47
Speaker 3: How do you get past that feeling?
00:05:50
Speaker 2: How do you deglaze yourself? Yeah?
00:05:53
Speaker 3: How do you manage that when you're just in the middle of a long tour?
00:05:57
Speaker 2: Well, you know, sleep is the key to the universe, for one thing. You try to find quiet places and moments to regroup and re gather because there's there can be a lot of momentum and dramatic political drama inside of the power structures that are traveling with you. You know what usually happens on a big rock tour with a lot of travel, a lot of finance involved, is me and Anne are like in the eye of the hurricane, where it's quiet and calm and peaceful together and our humors intact and our initial relationship just it's just like completely safe, but everything else is swirwing like the Dickens. It's like the Twister movie where you see cows go by and you know, there's go, there's the kitchen sing, there's a house over there. You know, just the emotional luggage that you kind of have to navigate through the baggage and the chaos that can surround you. But we do like to have a wellness room because we're gonna be in lots of arenas which are basically locker rooms, yeah, which you know, so you're gonna need something that smells good in there, like some lavender spray or lavender spray, some incense, and some good thick yoga mats and some music and turning the fluorescence off and some put some candles on and have a massage table in one room and then have the workout stuff like the TRX and the free weights and the pilates machine in the other room so you can strengthen or you can you know, go get bodywork, even if it's once in a while, you know, just try to keep strong and keep centered with it.
00:07:56
Speaker 3: Last time you went out, I saw there's a couple of dates on this tour with Deaf Leopard in Journey and last time you went out with them, it sounds like Deaf Leopard were just like party animals to an extent that you weren't expecting because at that point they were in their fifties and it sort of took you a bash. Are you expecting more of that this tour?
00:08:18
Speaker 2: They're older guys now, Like everybody has to slow down their party activity, you know at a certain point. I mean, for instance, you too have really slowed down because I've partied with you too. One time it was like whoa, where are what cities we land in on the private jet? Oh wait, you thought it was Paris, No, it's Vegas. You know, like stuff was going on. Everybody was drinking like fish and smoking like sex. But you know, you can't live like that when you're especially if you're a little bit older. So you know, those dance cards have been full for a while, so we I think even I don't know, even def Lepper, I mean, you can't actually go out and play and do it well if you're just destructed from a party, right. I mean, art actually plays everything live. We don't run tapes, as they say. Our show doesn't come out out of a box like most people do these days, which is not a just mental comment on my part, but I guess we're just kind of old school that way. We just really want to feel the authenticity of the moment that only happens that one particular time and there's nothing sort of canned going on around it, you know, And even at the expense of coming off really fallible and really human at times where your voice doesn't exactly work right or you squeak, you know, or you can't quite hit that note, or or your fingers don't work too well or your finger's hurt or whatever it is. You know, we just do it like that because that's how we know how to do it, you know. Like as a rock fan, if I go see the Eagles, for example, and you could tell some of the background vocal are sweetened, you know, or if you go see Paul McCartney and some of it's a little bit extra, you know, like the album sounding and stuff like that, it doesn't really matter, you know, there's no like shame in that. I think all that really matters is how beloved these songs are and the experience that people get from going all the way out of their way to go and see you play those songs that they love.
00:10:38
Speaker 3: Are you the type of fan if you go see someone like Paul McCartney, since you've loved the Beatles for so long, do you want to hear him play all the hits, all the early Beatles stuff, Wing stuff. Do you kind of get a little bit disgruntled if he starts to play a new song? Or because you're also an artist and a performer, do you totally get that and are you over supportive of that that new music moment?
00:11:04
Speaker 2: I tend that's a good question. I tend to be really overly supportive of anyone that you know, puts a toe into the new material column, you know, in a live show setting, especially when they have so many beloved songs to do. And I went and saw Paul on his eightieth roofday in San Francisco, and it was an incredibly good show. And you know, he's ever the Paul. He's dependable as the sun will rise. He's a genius songwriter. But there's so many songs that over a very actually pretty short period of time that became such landmark songs, and even with Wings as well as with the Beatles, but when he does something like Molofkin Tire or something more rare like Happiness in the Homeland or you know, love in Song or you know Tug of War. I mean, I know all all of its songs deep cuts. So that's kind of what I'm concentrating a little bit on with this new lineup of players in this band. We call Heart a couple of deep cuts, you know, to put in our back pocket to keep the set list from being always predictably the same, right, even for ourselves, you know. Yeah, living on the edge, it's like, okay, let's pull this one out. Oh my god, how does that go? Again? Let's see how does that go?
00:12:35
Speaker 3: Yeah?
00:12:36
Speaker 2: You know, if you're worth your salt as a player, a singer, songwriter, player, I think you can pretty much get through even if you mess up a little bit. You can have fun with it and make it work. And people kind of appreciate the imperfections, even maybe a little bit more than they appreciate something that's absolutely perfect.
00:13:01
Speaker 3: I was curious about your decision to play rhythm guitar rather than lead guitar, and if gender had anything to do with that decision early on, and if you still feel like, yeah, I'm a rhythm guitar player to the death.
00:13:17
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I've been known to step out play little bit of lead here and there on records and in live settings, and I toss in little I don't know, shred moments here and there. But I'm more like a Pete Townsend at my center. I'm an accompanist as a songwriter, so I approached my playing like a songwriter. So I'm accompanying the lyrics and the melody for the song. So it's the structure of the song that interests me more than the embellishing and kind of the frosting on top, you know. So for me, that's the meat and potatoes. That's the real, you know, essence. And you can add all the extra stuff, which is fun to do. And I'm not a horrible league player. I just don't do it that often because I'm more a building block song person in the way of play. But yeah, but I've always thought as a woman playing guitar, there's so many women right now that are younger women coming out that are just shredders, like Grace Bauers for example. I don't know if you've seen her on like Instagram or whatever, but She is kind of a Clapton type shredder. She's a blues player who plays instead of for the quantity of notes, she plays for the quality of the expression of the notes that she chooses that sound more like sentences than you know, show off stuff.
00:14:57
Speaker 3: I was surprised when I listened back to Dreamboat Annie, which is turning fifty.
00:15:01
Speaker 2: Next year next year.
00:15:03
Speaker 3: There's so much musical interplay on the songs. It's not just straightforward at all, and there's a lot of communication between the two guitars.
00:15:12
Speaker 2: Right.
00:15:12
Speaker 3: Was that something that was intentional from the beginning or did that just happen in jams?
00:15:18
Speaker 2: Well, I guess I would say both. I mean all of the above. It's intentional to try to have a dialogue with another guitar player, a rhythm and a lead player, which you hear a lot of that on Dreambani the album. And at that point it was Howard Lease and Roger Fisher, two really great players that I got to sort of cut my teeth, you know, my rock and roll live club band kind of recording first recording session teeth with the era we came from to the late sixties. By this point, we're releasing our first album in the mid seventies and seventy five, so we had all of that imprint From the late sixties, the Mind expanded sort of epic length songs and you know, tales of great Ulysses kind of stuff out there, and you know, like sticks and Rush and yes, you know and Heart. A lot of conceptualizing going on and yeah, you know, significance and depthy symbolism and stuff like that before cocaine, you know, before it cut all ego driven later.
00:16:37
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was going to say that feels very LSD esque.
00:16:41
Speaker 2: Very mind expanded from that era. So we were really starting out with the first album, I think.
00:16:49
Speaker 4: Really naive and doggedly determined, workmanlike about getting something very important recorded onto a vinyl disc, you know, and this might be our only chance to be heard.
00:17:06
Speaker 2: And it was really cool because it worked. I mean, just over my last weekend, I was having a birthday weekend at this beautiful beach in Oregon on the Oregon coast with my friend Sue Ennis that we did a whole bunch of songwriting with. And we have a project We've been digging through old cassettes for an old CDs for like a rarity project that We're just digging out with gems and morsels and hysterical little bits and song pieces and songwriting jams that turned into other songs that would be familiar someday. Stuff like that, and we had the blast of all blasts. But listening to a lot of those cassette tapes, you could hear Soul of the Sea forming, You could hear you know, even It Up, the beginnings of Even It Up coming together. And also we found the mother load of like Heart when they were called before I joined Heart, when they were called hocus Pocus in a club called oil Can Harry's in Vancouver. Received there's these real surreal tapes that the sound man used to get of the live performance to listen back and critique from like a ball team, you know. So yeah, so there's like a bunch of covers that we used to do, you know, a bunch of David Bowie's songs, a bunch of deep purple. It's like, oh my god. It reminded me how hard those club days were because you really had a lot of time to fill and probably close to you know, I don't know, five hours of music and banter. You really had a lot of time to fill and entertainment to provide.
00:19:03
Speaker 1: We have to take a quick break and then we back with more from Nancy Wilson and Leah Rose. We're back with Lea Rose and Nancy Wilson.
00:19:16
Speaker 3: I was asking Anne about the time in the book you talked about there's a period of time where you both would hang out with Stevie Nicks. Yeah, especially in the seventies when the big Fleetwood Mac albums were coming out. I was just curious about the relationship between Heart and Fleetwood Mac, and it sounds like you came together more in the eighties to hang out.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, they were kind of happening right before us, kind of as Hart was just starting to tiptoe into the scene, and they already had rumors out there, and we were just trying so hard to make an album and get out there and get a tour or whatever, and they were all over the radio, and you know, I felt so jealous of that band because there were two women in it. It sounded so good together, and they had the acoustic guitar kind of thing that I felt like I was bringing a lot of into our band. They kind of had it already, you know, like something we were trying to capture. They had already captured it. So I was really like, damn it, what makes us so different now? You know? But we did sound very different. I mean a lot of it's Anne's voice, you know, very signature. You know, the muscle and the power that she possesses and the way she sings is completely its own things. So lucky for us we had Anne, not just it know was soft rock. We had hard rock, so we could rock very hard and as quietly as well. So we probably had a lot more maybe versatility or something.
00:21:00
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was surprised. I asked Anne about her voice and she I asked her when she first realized that her voice was so powerful, and she said that she didn't think voice was very powerful.
00:21:11
Speaker 2: Yeah, her confidence is hard for her to she's she's hard on herself. But when she was a kid, a kid kid, and I was maybe nine or eight, we were all bunch of Hams, always singing harmonies into the family and you know, she would do ethel mermon. She would do this no business like show and she could just build it like this little kid and our parents would be like girls, girls, come on down the stairs, you know, and your ethel murmon. So She would just you know, blow the people's minds in the living room, and she just had this facility, you know, she just had these has these pipes that a few people have. It's God given.
00:22:02
Speaker 3: Do you think of both your gift as a songwriter, a player, a writer AND's voice and gift as a writer. Where does that come from in your mind?
00:22:14
Speaker 2: Oh? Well, I think the gift, the music gift comes from our parents and our grandparents and our aunts and our uncles. Our grandpa was the Irish tenor in the local church choir, and both of our mom and dad were met in choir when they decided they loved each other. And my dad was a singer in a barbershop quartet, and my mom was in various ensemble choirs and big choirs, and all of us grew up with choirs and choirs and harmony, singing in the car on the way to grandma's. You know, I think it's generational in our family and the love of music and listening to music and Ray Charles and Aretha Franklin. We always had a record player, you know, and we learned a lot of albums by Heart and Harry Bellefonte, Peggy Lee and Judy Garland and all of those great singers from that era. We were always singing along. Every Christmas. We had the same like Big Benjamin Britain Corral going on, and we'd sing in the house and decorate the tree singing in the house, you know. And you hear about those families, I guess we were one of them. Like the Beg's family. They were all singing the Jacksons. So it comes really naturally. It comes very honestly to both of us, you know, from the inside out.
00:23:48
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, and you can feel that too.
00:23:50
Speaker 2: No, it's true. I feel driven by it still, whether or not something's happening or going on, or successful or not successful. I feel driven to do music and create music, write music, play music. And it's like a destiny, you know, feeling of destiny because it's what your cellular memory knows.
00:24:16
Speaker 3: When you talk about the eighties now, or when you think about the eighties and the first formation of Heart started to sort of disintegrate and new players came in. You were signed to Capitol Records. They started bringing songwriters in. How devastating was that to you and Anne at the time.
00:24:37
Speaker 2: Well, we were kind of victims of longevity in a certain way because the styles changes and you wanted to not change that much. The mind expanded perspective was turning into a cocaine perspective, which was a little more money ego sort of driven. Therefore, you know, a stable of LA's hit songwriters were employed in tandem with these record companies to create the formulaa hits that were expected of the time and those big power ballads and you know, hairband music and so so we were like reluctantly kind of going along for survivals reasons and writing our own stuff meanwhile, you know, but we were kind of irritated with the whole atmosphere of that. The weather system just felt wrong to us, you know, around all of that image making type of stuff, because we were cool, kind of apple cheek girls from Seattle without makeup when we first started, and then it was all about the artifice and what you can wear and how much your jacket's going it's going to cost as much as a car. You know, like that's not important. It was never important to us, and so we muddled through pretty good in the eighties because we got a couple of really gorgeous songs out of that time, like like these Dreams and Alone, What About Love, and a few more. They're just gorgeous, well written, structured pieces of music that we still enjoy doing today, you know. So if that's the booty that we snuck out of the eighties, then it's well worth it.
00:26:26
Speaker 3: How have you changed the arrangements on some of those songs? Have you tried to take them away from their power ballad beginnings?
00:26:34
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, A good song you could do almost any way. I mean you could do Alone on a ukulele, you know, because it's a good song and it has a good shape to it, whether or not it's in a big format, a bombastic sounding format, or if it's just an acoustic guitar or piano. With these Dreams in particular, it's an oddball song. This changed different keys. I played it on mandolin, we do it with keyboards and percussion, and then we do it just acoustic on it, different keys, different arrangements. You know. The song's really flexible that way. And Alone we've sort of we merged Alone into what About Love at the guitar solo, which really worked well. So there's just ways to yeah, just try new versions out so that you're not so it's not just the album, you know.
00:27:34
Speaker 3: Was These Dreams originally written for Stevie Nicks.
00:27:37
Speaker 2: Yeah, Verdie Topin told me that once. He said, actually, Stevie Nicks rejected this song first, and they thought about it for her because if it's very diatheanous and mysterious, and you know, it's very gauzy sounding, and she rejected it because she was not taking outside material, thank you very much. And a lot of people were at the time and she wasn't. And I respect that a lot that she wasn't doing that. And it's not easy to write a song that fits the fashion of the current radio program either. So we gave, you know, we gave a lot of songs a good try. When we were I was at the beach with Sue listening to cassettes. There were some real turkeys, I mean, a lot of really bombastic ballad stranges of the Wold. You know. It's like, you know, like a bunch of very righteous sounding marching songs, kind of either marching rock songs or bombastic ballads with a lot of gated echo on the snare trum.
00:29:00
Speaker 5: We were like, oh, we us I think are head and shite because we were we were obviously trying really hard to keep up with the stable of la songwriter.
00:29:16
Speaker 2: Like the formulaic stuff is what we never could get right, you know. So the biggest global hit song was All I Want to Do Is make Love to You by Mutt Lang. Right. We recorded it and it was a huge smash and it was all over the world. Oh, I remember it was banned in Ireland, you know, because of the reverse sexism of it. But we were kind of proud of the fact that it was banned in Ireland. That's just the one that just never felt like a heart song exactly. It's a great track. It sounds genius on the radio, but it was never for Anne as a lead singer too, who has to sell what she's talking about in those lyrics of the song. It's really kind of more like a country story song. It's more like that. Yeah, it's not a real rock song per se.
00:30:13
Speaker 3: And I know Hart used to jam with a lot of musicians off stage and you can together have parties and sometimes at Ann's house later in Seattle, and it really reminded me of the stories of your family early on when you would have the hoot Nannies together, right, you know, totally were there any jams from that early era or any musicians that you've played with that really stand out.
00:30:39
Speaker 2: Definitely one of my favorite moments of coming back out of the eighties back to Seattle in the early nineties with our tail between our legs basically, you know, having been kind of gristed for the MTV mill there and the Seattle explosion was really cool. Suddenly it was really good music and guitars were back again, and all the layer cake production was blasted out of the water, like you know, smells like teen Spirit was like it. That was the flash mob moment in the culture where the eighties was definitely over, just instantly over, and you know, like eighties kind of power ballot bands that had a number one hit the week before were dropped from their label that day. You know, it was just that that exact like it was a surgical strike of rock and roll into the culture that made that happen. It was so so such a relief to us after coming out of that. And we had a party at Ann's house after we all kind of met each other because one of my oldest friends was managing Pearl Jam. He managed them forever. My friend Kelly Curtis still my best friend, and they all got together at some of the house around Andy Woods, who had just had odd from Mother Love Pone, who are then going to find Eddie Vedder and become pro jam So the whole community came together and we showed up to meet everyone kind of at this one big party, and we brought all of our dogs and everybody was crying and laughing and petting dogs and playing guitars. And then the next time we got together was at Ann's house and I ended up jamming with Jerry Cantrell, like cross legged in a corner and She's like, how I play the beginning of Mister all Wind? And I'm like, okay, that was like the best words I could have heard out of somebody that cool asking me that at that moment, because I got to feel cool again, like yeah, as like a musician should be able to feel in their hometown and not shamed by the new generation of people pushing back against the hair bands of the eighties and so so you know, that meant everything met the world to me and we're still tight. As a matter of fact, Stone Gossard in Petal Time he actually ended up buying a house from Anne at the beach in Oregon that I was just at last weekend, and the and Sue Mines were blown like we were here in our twenties writing Barracuda stuff, you know, and listening through the history of us doing that there in this beautiful location where we always used to go for ultimate hideout. So it was really an amazing time to come back to Seattle in the nineties and then be so well brought into the fold like that. It meant the world.
00:34:01
Speaker 3: I loved in the book. You were saying that Seattle musicians they won't bullshit you. If they don't like something, they'll tell you. They're not just going to kind of kiss up to you because you're already established. They'll say like, no, actually that kind of sucked.
00:34:16
Speaker 2: No, that's really true. They're not looking to be anti everything either. They're being honest. And it's a great thing about that community. That missed community in Seattle. I mean, people in program are really truly friends. They are there for each other. Kelly would Curtis would take his office employees and the band all out on retreats out of the Oregon coast, oh and stay at those same places where we used go right, and just get in small groups and talk about everybody and how things are going, and really communicate with each other about what can we do better? How can I make you feel better? I don't know. I just still feel really close to the people from Seattle in that particular way, because you can really tell the truth to each other other and you're not just smiling whatever.
00:35:13
Speaker 3: You know.
00:35:14
Speaker 1: After this last break, we'll be back with more from Nancy Wilson. We're back with the rest of Lea Rose's conversation with Nancy Wilson.
00:35:26
Speaker 3: When you started to pivot and work on film scores with Cameron Crowe and you worked on Almost Famous, how much of your experience was used in that movie? Was a lot of it? Like direct source material for the movie?
00:35:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, most of the Hearts played most of the sound of the score. Music for Almost Famous is me playing everything. So I played you know, percussion and keyboards, and I played hurdy gurdy, a little bit of you know, synthesizer, piano, guitar, electric guitar, bass guitar, and vocals, you know as atmosphere, and I really had a blast doing that. I actually had a couple of musical instrumental pieces i'd recorded along the way, one in particular, called the Queue, ended up being called Deflower the Kid. So there was a piece of music that I'd already recorded just as a piece for myself for a different project that fit perfectly into the scene where with the William Miller characters being deflowered by the band aids in a hotel room in slow motion. So it actually worked out very well. It's like they cut to the song, so it worked really perfectly for that one scene, the whole scene, and I had a few little bits and pieces scraps of music sitting around it I threw into the mix. But I recorded a lot of it just on a little cassette stuffed into a tiny Costco TV player with really good like Noyman microphones at my friends my friend's house, you know, no no soundproofing, nothing, just very low fi but close enough so that you couldn't really hear the garbage trucks outside.
00:37:32
Speaker 3: You know.
00:37:32
Speaker 2: So so Jerry Maguire was done like that. Almost famous was done on the pretty much really low fly by like that. My first ever movie session, like which scared the shit out of me, was for for say anything. Anne Dudley was the score artist on that, So she was really nice to me. It was like I don't know how to read. I mean I learned, but I don't remember how to read, and so it's like, just show me how it goes my ear and I'll just play it. So I played, you know, guitar parts for that in a scoring session for my first time ever. And then the next thing I did was Jerry Maguire by myself. Wow, with the Costco TV.
00:38:18
Speaker 3: What an incredible new experience to have at that point in your career, still in music, still making music, but now by yourself. Yeah, such a different way to make music.
00:38:32
Speaker 2: So different. Well, I had a really good music editor, Carl Caller, that I did a lot of that stuff with for years, and he was really a good translator for me to know how to approach it, like because he would be able to take something I'd done and edit it together to fit the screen. So I was not encumbered by what was on picture and played a picture very often, just took for that those five seconds or whatever. But you know, we got really experimental when we did Vanilla Sky. There's some really crazy stuff that we did in that together. There's one called Elevator Beat where the Tom Cruise character is going up the elevator at the end before he jumps off the building, relives his life as he's falling. I went to a flea market, the Pasadena flea Market, and I found these old vinyl discs that you could play on home entertainment keyboard machines. You would certain a disc and it would play the groovy beat that you could play along with on your keyboard, your your home entertainment organs. Wow, so the Casio maybe, yes, yes, so really analogue, scratchy old albums that people would like.
00:39:57
Speaker 6: D you know, it would have like do you know, little little groove beats or like you turn it over, would be like.
00:40:11
Speaker 2: A shoff with the flutes right there. And so then you could tape it and run the tape backwards and have this crazy ass insanity sounding thing that you could also play forward stuff too, stuff like that. So I thought it was Brian Wilson there for a minute, and you know, or the Beatles on drugs, you know, And we just tried everything like that On Vanilla Sky. I was clearing out my garage, throwing stuff into a garbage scan and I recorded the sound of big flanks and clunks and planks going into the garbage can and used it as a rhythm track for Vanilla Sky where he's walking through the streets with his mask.
00:41:00
Speaker 3: On stuff that was so eerie.
00:41:03
Speaker 2: So it's like crazy stuff, you know.
00:41:06
Speaker 3: Did you have a lot of influence over the stories of the movies as well?
00:41:11
Speaker 2: Well? With Kevin writing scripts, he was always writing, rewriting and rewriting again and reading out loud for dialogue and just for the feel of how it sounds and what it feels like. So yeah, I did a lot of responding, and I made a lot of notes, gave a lot of notes, you know, a sentence here, a sentence there that might land in a funny, cool way, And so I kind of worked a little bit on some of the dialogue mainly. And it's a lot like songwriting, especially a writer like Camera Crow. He writes with music in his head, So he's writing his scenes like songs in a lot of ways where he's working toward a song that's going to be in the scene or or they're going to have, you know, a feeling of a song that they're going to act the scene too, that's playing on set, even if you don't have it in the movie later stuff like that. So it's all steeped in music, and the cadence of the dialogue should sound musical. Yeah. Yeah.
00:42:24
Speaker 3: Did you have any experiences on set with the actors once you got to the point where the movie was actually being filmed.
00:42:32
Speaker 2: My most memorable wildest one was on Almost Famous when Billy Krudip was playing the rock star on Acid of the scene where he goes to the kids party and it's a really funny part, and they were about to film the part where he's up on the roof going I'm a golden God, you know, and he said, so, Nancy, did you ever take LSD? And I was like, yes, I did. He does tell me what it's like, because he was about to go do this scene like right after that, and I said, well, it's kind of like you're like your nerves are all kind of sparks coming out at the ends of your fingers, and your head feels like an opening observatory where you're starting to see the universe and the stars and you feel kind of elevated, like you're part of everything and you're part of God and love all of the same time. So so he kind of went up. He kind of went out there and he sort of exactly did what I just said said. If you look at it today, you'll see like you can almost see sparks coming out of his fingertips. It's electrified.
00:43:50
Speaker 3: Yes, that must be so interesting to have the opportunity to talk to an actor and see them just turn it on.
00:43:58
Speaker 2: I know, I have so much respect for that. I tried to act a couple of times. It really did not go well for me because, you know, I know how to put myself in another like musical persona kind of way, but like just walking and talking is that to me is so foreign. I don't know how to not be who I am, you know, right to be someone else.
00:44:24
Speaker 3: Did you ever see Tom Cruise on set acting? I imagine he then he should be really fantastic to watch.
00:44:30
Speaker 2: He was fantastic. He's a fantastic human being. I mean, his eyes are kind of like headlights. You know, He's just full of this light that comes out of him. And I don't know what it is. I mean, maybe it's scientology. I don't know, but it's it's positive if it works for him. Obviously it really does. And he's a sweetheart, and you know he kisses your mom when he meets your mom, and she's like, you know, she's a flutter and he's just the nicest human being.
00:45:01
Speaker 3: I wanted to hear about your experience around the time you started working on film scores and you Heart for a small amount of time, and then you had the experience of going and seeing Heart play and being in the audience and seeing and perform. What was that like for you to witness her as an audience member?
00:45:22
Speaker 2: That was really actually amazing for me to see that. I mean, I never left the band. I was taking a sabbatical, you know, kind of trying to start my family period of time that I was always going to come back to the band, just so that's real clear. So when Anne came to LA, I went and saw her at a cool club somewhere in town, and I was like, I don't want to, oh, you know, I don't want to go try to go up on stage or do anything with you, because I just I've never got to be a spectator and not stand next to you on the stage. So I sat up in the audience, you know, trying to disappear as hard as I could not be there and just be the lie on the wall and see this amazing singer. It's like she good. You know, she's such a good singer. Like I never I'm so usually standing there concentrating on the part I'm playing in a harmony that's coming up, or the other thing that's gonna happen next to just watch her sing. It's like Jesus, she's like one of the greats. This all done.
00:46:34
Speaker 3: What was the deciding factor this time to go back on tour now.
00:46:39
Speaker 2: Well, there was kind of a natural break over the last since twenty nineteen was our last big tour. You know, there was a lot of political shuffle and bustle and scuffle and it was hard to get or putting back together as far as like who owns what and who makes what decisions and what is hard exactly and yeah, you know who's in it, and so a bunch of really boring, unnecessary logistical flex kind of stuff. And you know, after twenty sixteen there was that break happened too because you know, obvious things that we thank god it's a long time ago now, but just stupid stuff that's inside the family. It was unnecessary, a negative stuff. We had to try to get over that first and then Once we got over that, we went out on to the twenty nineteen tour and that was a really hugely successful tour, but there were still more I don't know, drama.
00:47:47
Speaker 3: To work out.
00:47:48
Speaker 2: So we're back again five years later. Unfortunately it's a lot late later. I mean, we'd kind of ready to go out for quite a while. But you know, I've got a trainer, I'm getting strong, I keep my strength up, and I think it's going to be a good one. I think it's going to be fun and really really and I love playing with my sister. I really like being next to her on a rock stage, and you know, while we can, it's a good time to do it.
00:48:19
Speaker 3: So do you think you'll do another album?
00:48:22
Speaker 2: Well, I've been writing songs with Sue and one of them we're doing in Heart now called roll the Dice. It's a new Heart song. So you know, there's a couple of other songs that might kind of come out of it. But right now, these days, it's more about one song at a time than an albums. But I would love to do more songs with Art for art, but first the tour.
00:48:48
Speaker 3: You know, yeah, I have such a great time on the tour. I hope all goes well. People are going to go crazy and be so happy to see you both so well.
00:48:55
Speaker 2: I'm going to have my stash of Gaffer's tape and my scissors stuff and the clips.
00:49:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, your whole kid, the kit.
00:49:04
Speaker 2: I've got the kit ready to go.
00:49:05
Speaker 3: Thank you so much for talking today. It's been so much fun.
00:49:08
Speaker 2: Thank you. Really great to talk to you two, and very thorough.
00:49:15
Speaker 1: Thanks to Nancy Wilson of Heart. Stay tuned next week to hear from our sister and We'll see You. Can hear all of our favorite Heart songs on a playlist at broken record podcast dot com. Subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken Record Podcast, where you can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at broken Record. Broken Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is Ben Tollery. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's by any Eats. I'm justin Richmond.
