Modern Touring and Future Outlook

This message comes from Data IQ . AI is everywhere but companies struggle to prove results. For that they need people, orchestration, and governance working as one. Data IQ is the platform for AI success built to bring it all together. Visit DA TA IKU . com slash NPR . Bullseye with Jessie Thorne is a production of maximumfund. org and is distributed by NPR It's Bullseye. I'm Jesse Thorne . If you turn on the car radio in a rental car and it's on the classic Rock Station . Maybe you're the kind of person that reaches for that tuner knob and heads left over to public radio . But what if a heart song is playing? Like what if it's Magic Man ? Cold Mate nights long ago when I was not so strong What he might ? Never seen us so glue so I could not run the way it seemed. We'd seen each other in a dream. Seemed like he knew me. He looked right through me . Yeah . Girls, I said with a smile . You have to love me and let's get , but try to understand , try to understand . Try, try to try to understand them magically Seriously, you couldn't change it. That song rocks . So does Barracuda, soda does crazy on you. So does basically every record they put out in the seventies, they are classics for a reason . Any band could put out one album like that and tour on its legacy for the rest of their career. Hart decided instead , to reinvent themselves as one of the biggest torch song bands of the nineteen eighties . What about love alone? These dreams these dreams But the sight of the night Hello another life is dream to see when it's cool outside and morrow Now, at the helm of heart there are two sisters, guitarist Nancy Wilson and singer Anne Wilson, who's my guest today. Growing up, the two of them played folk songs together in their childhood home . When Anne graduated from high school, she started playing in bands near their hometown, Seattle . And pretty soon she realized something, well, actually a few things. First of all , most of her fellow musicians were dudes . And second , most of those dudes wanted to sing like Robert Plant or Roger Dalt , but they couldn't . But you know who could ? Yeah , Anne Wilson. Wilson has fronted heart for over fifty years and she's still performing today. She still sounds awesome . What else is going on in Wilsonville? Well, she is the subject of a new documentary. Anne Wilson, in my voice , Wilson just wrapped up a national screening tour of the documentary with plans for an eventual wider release . I'm so thrilled to talk with the legend, Anne Wilson. Let's get right into it. Heading out this morning into the sun griding on the diamond wave little darling wom an. Carm ink across her sea Oh dream boat any shipboard dream Dreamful Daddy , little ship of dreams . Anne Wilson, welcome to Bolsai. I'm so happy to have you on the show . Well, thank you for having me here . When you and your sister were teenagers, what kind of music did you make together ? Well, together we made mostly acoustic folk music at the very beginning . Our parents, you know, always played music in the house, all different kinds , but it was music of their generation . But they got into at the end of their youth , they started to get into the limelighters and the Kingston trio and the Peter Paul and Mary and those types of things. So of course Nancy and I picked up on that and we learned all those songs and learned how to play the guitar from Paul Simon , Simon Garfunkle and a little bit later, a little bit above Dylan, but it was mostly the softer folk things that we were into at the beginning. Did you have a favorite to sing together that you remember ? Oh yeah, the times they are changing . We were always just looking for ways to rebel against our parents who were nice enough to let us live in their house, rent free and feed us and clothe us in suburbia where our lives were perfect , but we still had to rebel. So the times they are changing was our anthem for a while . I mean, I'm aware that , you know, there was a time when the Kingston trio were a revolutionary and relatively hip group. But if you're gonna play an acoustic guitar and sing folk songs and also try to rebel , you have a sort of limited pallet and the times they are a changing is one of the options . That's right . There were all kinds of songs like that, especially Dylan's songs. He specialized in them . But we were more like I said into the soft core sort of Paul Simon way of rebelling the sounds of silence way. Did it occur to you you that were an act? Like did you think of yourselves ever as oh we're going to go out and conquer the world or did you think of yourselves as we're two sisters in our house entertaining ourselves . Well both, you know, at different times . I think at first we thought we're going to be famous and we're going to be huge because we're us, you know, and there's something so fabulous and wonderful and special about us that the whole world's going to know it. That's kind of what we felt when Nancy was eight and I was four years older . What about when you were, you know , seventeen and thirteen or something like that? Where those kind of dreams while still distant are could actually be real, you know what I mean? Yeah, things were starting to get more serious by then because by the time I was seventeen or eighteen, I was in rock bands in Seattle, you know, high school bands that would play at the soccer and all that kind of stuff . But Nancy was too young to be involved in that because she was still in school . So we kind of broke up for a while at that point because, I was older and I was out gallivanting around with a bunch of guys till late at night playing bars and clubs and everything . So things started to change . We started to play different kinds of music more rock oriented, like we sang the door song when the music's over at our parents youth Sunday in church We thought it would be a charming song, you know, for the congregation to hear, but as it turned out, half of 'em walked out. So , you know , I guess that changed the church up a little bit We still have time we might still get by . Every time I think about it I won't cry with balms and with little kids keep coming easy in time to be your got two and doing already . There's something that to do in the night the rain When did you learn to be like a rock singer? Like when did you learn to rip on stage rather than just sound nice? Purdy . Yeah , well , that was a process . I think that my first real vocal idol was you know, Aretha Franklin, of course . So she always sang like from the church, you know , full voice and high and just with the elastic voice of that type of singing . And I could never do that, but that's what I aspired to. I was never the girl in choir that got the solo. I was just the quiet alto in the back . So when I got into bands, like, I think when I was about twenty one , I was in a band up in Vancouver , called Heart, and we were just in the basement trying to figure it out , and we wanted to do a bunch of Led Zeppelin songs because that's what was being played on the radio and deep purple songs and stuff and none of the men in the band could sing that high . So the job fell to me to sing like ram blon and Rock and Roll and types of early Zeppelin songs that where he really just shrieks, you know, he's way up high, and that's where I learned all of a sudden it's like the roof just came off and I was able to just sort of sail. It surprised me and everyone in the band I was in too because all of a sudden the quiet little chick who was singing the ballads, you know, and kind of banging the tamourine stepped up and you know sang this other stuff that was I guess you could say unlady like and unusual for girls at that time. How did it feel physically to belt and almost scream relative to singing a ballad and trying to be pretty . Right. Well, you never scream . That's one thing I learned real early on is it might sound like you're screaming, but you're making a scream, you know, you're not actually screaming or else you're just going to lose your vocal mechanism right away . And I think that's where a lot of singers go wrong . And stuff like smoking and all that is total taboo for me, at least. I could never do it and sing at the same time . At first, I remember being horse all the time the next day after a show. And those days we were playing like four sets a night . You'd start at nine and you'd end at one or two, you know, so it was hard work. It was really rough and a big strain on my throat and my body, but I got strong behind it and I guess I learned how to make the sounds that sounds so primal without wrecking my body. We're gonna take a break when we come back even more with heart lead singer Anne Wilson. Stay with us. It's Bullseye from maximumfund. org and NPR . This message comes from Schwab. At Schwab, you can get everything from self directed investing to full service wealth management, all in one place, no matter your investing goal, life stage, amount to invest , or know how, you can invest your way with Schwab . This message comes from Rosetta Stone. Their latest innovation, Rosetta Stone Sapphire, helps you go from knowing phrases to speaking confidently. They have helped millions learn languages for over thirty years. Take your language skills to the next level with Rosetta Stone Sapphire. Get unlimited access to all twenty five Rosetta Stone Languages, plus all the new sapphire learning tools . Visit Rosetta Stone. com slash npron and receive twenty percent off today. Support for NPR and the following message come from Spectrum Business, providing connectivity solutions to help your business stay online and on track, delivering fast, reliable internet, phone, TV, and mobile solutions, all backed by one hundred percent U. S. based support. They offer scalable plans and straightforward pricing. Spectrum business , reliable connections, responsive support, and tailored solutions that power your success. Learn more at spectrum. com slash business. Restrictions apply, services not available in all areas Support for NPR and the following message come from FX's The Lowdown. From acclaimed reservation dogs creator Stirlin Harjo, comes FX's The Low Down, starring five time Oscar nominee Ethan Hawk. The series follows a tuls a Truth storian, whose obsession with the facts always leads to trouble. Named an AFI program of the year and hailed as a gloriously off kilter noir, the Lowdown is Emmy eligible in all comedy categories , stream it now on Hulu and Disney plus . This message comes from the International Rescue Committee. Across the Middle East, in areas like Gaza and Lebanon, conflict has forced millions of families to flee their homes . IRC staff are on the ground delivering critical supplies, but they need to scale up support. All donations are matched to provide twice the emergency aid. Give now at rescue dot org sl ash rebuild . Welcome back to Bullseye. I'm Jessie Thorne. My guest is Anne Wilson. She's the founder and lead singer of Heart . Heart is one of the greatest rock bands of all time. They've been rock and roll hall of Famers since twenty thirteen. She's the voice behind Barracuda, crazy on you, these dreams, and so many more hits. Let's get back into our conversation. I want to play a little bit of you guys covering Zeppelin, you and your sister playing Zeppelin at the Kennedy Center honors. . You know, like you're playing Stairway to heaven . And how could you ever like it is one of the most iconic recordings in the history of American popular music, right? And yeah, it's almost you had to go on stage and do it in tribute in front of the president and the , you know, the people in the band and all of this stuff, like one of the most ridiculous challenges and one of the best things I've ever watched . So can you tell me like how you felt going up on stage in front seventy thousand members of rock and roll royalty and the president and his wife to sing a song that is so profoundly someone else's And the members of Led Zeblin were there and Yo Yoma and all these big luminaries, you know, it was a whole two days of it where you go there and there's a big rehearsal where you rehearse what it's going to be musically and then the next day, the day of the show they take you to the White House and you have a little where you get to meet people you shake hands yeah at the White House and then you go back to the venue and you go to your dressing room and you start to think about it and go w,ow , in two hours , I'm going to be up there singing stairway to heaven. I better just relax here because it's not something you want to get all wound up for . Like in my way of thinking, the best way to attack something like that is with relaxation and calm and peace . And so you just go up there and you just you just think of some your ins , all you're involved with. Not who's out there in the audience, not who's looking at you , not what anybody might think , not about the millions of people out in the dark , you know, who are gonna see it on TV , none of that, just the song, just the chords, the beauty of composition . That's all . In the tree by the broken there's a song bird sing sometimes all of our thought s are scared makes me wonder There's a feeling I get when I look . You sound so great . Thank you for recording. When your sister joined the band , it wasn't long before it was your real life job to be rock stars Yeah . What was that transition like for you? Well , when you're young , you're in your early twenties and all of sudden you start getting people telling you how fantastic you are and how just bloody cool you are and you're just the wow, the newest thing, the voice of a generation. I mean, all this kind of stuff goes into your young ego strengthened self and you it's a struggle not to believe it . You have to keep yourself from believing it because if you believe all that stuff , you're just going to come off like a fool . You really are . And that happened to me, that happened to us, I think, a few times when we just said things in the press maybe that were that were just a little bit too cocky. Like I've never considered myself at any time to be the voice of the generation. Who would want that job ? Not me . I never would . I think when the big checks started to roll in, all the money started to come in. That was a big change too. That changes everything. It changes everybody . That's when we started to have issues among us in the band . We're about money because who wants to not have a really cool fur coat from Europe in nineteen seventy two, you know I don't know . There's just all kinds of ways that you can make mistakes when you're going from regular person to rock star, you know You said something in an interview that struck me as so tough and insightful about sibling relationships. And I am paraphrasing , but it was basically that a pitfall of being really close with a sibling is that you can presume you know what's going on inside them and forget that they are their own person That is very true, very true . Especially when you don't live together like you do when you're kids, you live together at your parents' house. When you're older, you live like friends live like an apartment or something together . When you have your own place apart from your sibling , you lose that language , that second language, you know ? Like I can't assume that I understand what's inside Nancy's heart I can guess at it and I can be really wrong a lot of the time. When I read about the world of rock noll in the nineteen seventies , one of the things that strikes me is just, well, I mean, look, it was pretty hostile to human life , sustainable human life in some ways , but to women insanely hostile, like dangerous. , all over . Like stay away, you know, like don't come near this. This belongs to us . That was some of the message that we received when we first started out . Little , really insulting things that guys would do like say to Nancy , well you're a really good looking little girl. Is that guitar really plugged in, you know , or just calling you dear or just all those little things that just are designed to keep you sub . You're never going to be the dominant big dog in the room. You're just always going to be the and just so you know it, you know? I mean, that's how it used to be. It's not so much that way now . There's still a bit of it lurking around in the dark corners, but I think that we have moved on . I mean, like in part being a rock star was defined by men being inhumane towards women. Like that was part of the idea of what it was to do rock . Yeah, yeah was to be a monster . Yeah, and that's a that's a really good insight because that's the that gave birth to the whole girls dressing up like strippers and hookers and everything like that and going to rock shows. I mean that style was given birth by that very thing . Yeah rock was designed for guys to find girls . And so when girls started to do rock , it became really obvious that we had to invent our own universe of rock . It couldn't just be okay, dressing up like a guy putting on the black leather , you know, trying to look really tough and acting like a guy and that's not even real. That's just putting on a it's cosplay . So we realized we had to make something new let's think the saw you go I have it on the hallway Smile like a son just as you ready and tails in New World . You lie so long and snowy . I believe you have met now World Barracuda . I want to talk for a second about maybe Heart's most iconic hit on a list of iconic hits, which is Barracuda . This is a song where this is like one of those songs where you're walking down the street, you hear it coming out of a store . You like stop to think about how much the song Barracuda Kicks but I'd use stronger language if I weren't on the radio . Do you remember the first time you heard that guitar riff? Yeah , it was when the guys in our band at the time were doing a sound check before a show and they had just been fooling around with this . And that's all they had . And they were just fooling around with that again and again and again . And that's the first time I heard it But the sound that was on that guitar on the record was something that was very carefully built in the studio . It's a cool riff riff and that riff was come up with by Roger Fisher . He really did a great job on that. Is it important to you when you two are now , even as you and your sister are both in your se venties to be playing live and not enacting heart to playback track . Oh god, yes. That's the ultimate important thing The minute we start lip syncing or something, I think we should just get off stage . Go to rocking chair , you know , because that's that's just I don't know, that's just a cardinal sin where I'm concerned . No lip syncing. I want to play a little bit of you and your sister on the Kelly Clarkson show. It was just a couple years ago . Kelly Clarkson is there and she sings a little bit, she sings a little bit of backup vocals to you, but it's mostly just you and your sister singing and she's playing acoustic guitar. There's a band too , but it's mostly just that acoustic performance. Let's take a listen to it. Cold and night so long ago, but I was not so strong, you know, a bree men can do have seen eyes so blue . I could not run away at sink , seed each other in a dream , seemed like he knew me, he looked right through me . Yeah Come on girl , he said with a smile . You don't have to love me at Leskin get high , but try to understand . Try to understand , try to try to understand I'm a magic man . The two of you sound so great together . Is that Kelly? Yeah, I think she comes in right . She comes in there at the end. I mean, she could sing anything, you know, she's Kelly Clarkson. Yeah . What's it like for you to be singing that song from , you know, when you were twenty three years old or whatever. Yeah, I tell you, that's that's one of the ones that I had the hardest time reconnecting with when we first started doing it again because that's the story from a twenty two year old girl and her first love, you know . And now here I am all these years later, I'm married, I you know, I have all this life experience and stuff. So it's really hard to reach back to that girl . Especially when I when I hear the words and I hear the mel odies and how they're written to support twenty two year old voice, you know ? It's pretty cool It's difficult though . I mean what about just physically ? Like your body's different, your voice is different than it was fifty years ago. Oh yeah , way different. But you sound incredible . Well, thank you. I've worked on keeping the high register intact just by , you know, not screaming and stuff like we spoke about earlier and just constantly working , always doing it . I don't take like years off and then go, oh, I guess I'll sing again , you know . I try to be as current I can with it always. I mean, there's such an athletic element to it in every way . Yeah , very much so. Like I do at least an hour and a half of warm up before a show . And just and that opens it up and that just kind of prepares the way so you don't just take your throat out there and just hit it, you know , your throat is just like any other part of your body. If you're gonna jog, you warm up first . That performance also if I have my timeline right , not that far from chemo, right? I think that was before that was right before . Yeah, I probably was just about to get the diagnosis at that point . When you were going through chemo, were you worried about beyond just the regular cancer things , also Also losing the physical gifts that allow you to sing and move on stage and be the rock star that you've been for fifty years ? Yeah, of course. I really did worry about my physical self on stage more than I worried about it , you know, any other way , which is weird because I spent all my life doing this . So what I would care about the most would be, Oh my God, will I still be able to sing , yeah, I definitely worried about that . But through all that journey I had this sort of unbreakable idea that okay, I'm going to do what I need to do and I'm going to get to the other side of it and hopefully everything will be alright. I think it will be. So I had this optimism that now looking back on it I think was probably a really strong tool in not getting all depressed because I know lots of people who get that cancer diagnosis and they go into deep despair and they're scared, they're going to die and they worry about like what chemo is going to be like and radiation and all those things that they do . And sure those things are really tough . They're really rough and they're hard on your body and it takes a long time to recover from them . The recovery from cancer is harder than the cancer really in life . But I don't know . I won't say it didn't touch me on a deep level because it did, it really did . But I never once felt like I was falling into a black hole. We have so much more to get into with Anne Wilson. When we return from our break, Anne Wilson has performed in a band with her sister for over fifty years , half a century of recording and writing and performing music with one of her closest living relatives. So what's that like? We'll get into it. It's Bullseye from Maximumfund. org and NPR . This message comes from Schwab. With the new Schwab teen investor account, teens can gain hands on investing experience and build positive money habits. It's an account co owned by you and your team, so you can monitor and engage with the account while your team learns how to invest and manage money. Learn more at Schwab. com . This message comes from Rosetta Stone and their newest l anguage learning experience, Rosetta Stone Sapphire, personalized learning so you can focus on what matters most to you. Practice real life conversations in an interactive setting before you use your skills in the real world. Take your language skills to the next level, get unlimited access to all twenty five Rosetta Stone languages, plus all the new Sapphire Learning tools. Visit rosettaestone dot com slash npr and receive twenty percent off today. This message comes from Progressive Insurance. You're listening to this podcast, so you've got a curious mind. Did you know that drivers who switch and save with progressive save over nine hundred dollars on average? Visit progressive. com and get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by. Progressive casualty insurance company and affiliates, national average twelve month savings of nine hundred forty six dollars by new customers surveyed who save a progressive between june twenty twenty four and may twenty twenty five. Potential savings will vary . Sunscreen companies calculate SPF by testing it on volunteers' butts. There is a can of spam in the Mariana Trench. A Nobel Prize winning physicist from the Manhattan Project invented modern speed bumps. Mesoamerican native people invented kidney medicine that glows in the dark. On the podcast secretly incredibly fascinating, we explore this kind of amazing stuffuff. St about ordinary topics like sunscreen and spam and speed bumps topics you'd never expect to be in the title of the podcast. Secretly incredibly fascinating. Find us by searching for the word secretly in your podcast app and at maximumfun. org . It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorne. My guest is Anne Wilson . She's the lead singer of Heart I have been doing comedy with my friend Jordan since we were twenty and nineteen years old, respectively. So twenty five years . And there have been times in that when we have been more personally close and times when we've been more personally distant distant . And I think sometimes about how grateful I am that we had to show up to work together even in the times when we were more distant . Yeah , because I mean in our case we're both conflict diverse and would have just drifted off into space in opposite directions at some point, right ? But working with your sister for fifty years , I wonder if you had that feeling like, you know, there's been many intense conflicts between the two of you that you've talked about publicly that like , yes, but also your job is to show up and you can't stand on stage with your sister every night for that long without remembering that you love her . For sure not, yeah. I mean, that's first and foremost, that's right at the top. That's how we do this. I don't think we could have done this for fifty years any other way . But you know , it's about time it was about time that Nancy and I had some kind of a falling out back when we did a few years ago when we fell out . It was about time because we had never had that happen before in all our years . And it wasn't natural for us well we both, like you say, we're both conflict diverse . So we could just go, Oh no, everything's fine . We present well in this family . And it really isn't all that well , but so when we did fall out, and then we came back together, which was a process just a little bit at a time and making sure it's things are really getting worked out, you know ? It's a real reunification , which is great . And it's deeper Heading out this morning to the sun . Griding on the diamond was diamond one with her sea Oh dream old any ship of dream Oh any dream Bo aty It's just difficult to go on stage now as hard given everything that you two have been through over fifty plus years . Well, it's different for me now in that I don't think about anything at all except the band when we're on tour . All I concern myself with is just that time on stage , the ninety minutes or whatever it is , that's it. I'm not interested in any backstage politics. I don't want to hear about any dramas, I don't want anything except just that time , that pure time. Just let me have that . And I think that's what's different for me now because I used to just get up there and I'd be singing a and way I'd be thinking of other things and you know, sometimes get all discombopulated because I'm not paying attention . Now we're paying attention . Absolutely . I think Nancy is too. I think she enjoys being in the band we have now more than she's ever enjoyed any other one, I think, because it's it's the best one. It's just powerful and clean and sophisticated . It's really good for her to play with these guys because they're on such a high level and they push her and she responds . So yeah, we're both really feeling it's different in a really cool way. Have you seen Chapel Ron sing Barracuda? Yeah, yep, I have. Isn't it cool? Yeah , yeah . She lets it go, oh boy she gets the basic spirit of it, you know, which I think is great . I think it's it's really great . She's such a spirited pop star. We're so lucky to have some pop stars like her who really bring a lot of voice, not just singing voice, but like point of view to being a pop star. And it's so cool that record that was a hit for you decades ago fits so perfectly into what makes Chapel Roan special as a pop star. Right, yeah. No, she's a good kid and smart . I think she's just starting out and she's going to go far to mark my words . Anne Wilson predicts success for Demo Ron . I think that's safe money . No, it's true. I mean you can't rely on it just because somebody's huge now that they're they're going to be huge in fifty years , that takes some doing . But no, she's she's great . How did you feel about being a babe in the seventies and the different kind of being a babe that you were in the eighties as the front woman of a band. How comfortable did you feel with that idea? And how did you want to express it? How were you obliged to express it . Yeah, well I'll tell you at the beginning I've never been comfortable being a babe . I've never wanted to be a babe n,or have I ever been successful at being a babe? Well , in the seventies or in the eighties or any time . I would never contradict your experience of it I might disagree with the very last part , but please, by all means continue. It's just that there are so many rules to babehood that there are just too many rules for me I just can't do it . And something different was asked of you ten years into your career from what was asked of you in the beginning of your career, I think. Like the way that the music industry worked in nineteen eighty four when , you know, you had to be all of , you know, the experiencing of your music that was happening out there was happening with video attached, you know? Right. Yeah . Yeah , well , that became a lot more challenging because you had to not only be talented as a rock singer , but you had to look beautiful . You had to be able to dance somewhat . You had to be able to pull off outlandish costumes and big tall high heels and big extension hair, huge hairdoes and all this stuff and be kind of like a drag queen That's what it and there's nothing against drag queens. I love 'em, but back then as a woman