Ann Wilson of Heart

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:23)
Bullseye with Jesse Thorn is a production of maximumfun.org and is distributed by NPR.

**Jesse Thorn** (0:43)
It's Bullseye, I'm Jesse Thorn. 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?
Seriously, you couldn't change it, that song rocks. So does Barracuda, so does Crazy On You, so does basically every record they put out in the 70s. 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. Heart decided instead to reinvent themselves as one of the biggest torch song bands of the 1980s. What about love, alone, these dreams, these dreams?
Now, at the helm of heart, there are two sisters, guitarist Nancy Wilson and singer Ann Wilson, who's my guest today. Growing up, the two of them played folk songs together in their childhood home. When Ann 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 Daltrey. But they couldn't. But you know who could? Yeah, Ann Wilson. Wilson has fronted heart for over 50 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. Ann 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, Ann Wilson. Let's get right into it.

**Ann Wilson** (4:29)
Riff of Dream.

**Jesse Thorn** (4:40)
Ann Wilson, welcome to Bullseye. I'm so happy to have you on the show.

**Ann Wilson** (4:44)
Well, thank you for having me here.

**Jesse Thorn** (4:46)
When you and your sister were teenagers, what kind of music did you make together?

**Ann Wilson** (4:52)
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 the 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 and Garfunkel.
And a little bit later, a little bit of Bob Dylan, but it was mostly the softer folk things that we were into at the beginning.

**Jesse Thorn** (5:40)
Did you have a favorite to sing together that you remember?

**Ann Wilson** (5:44)
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.

**Jesse Thorn** (6:09)
I mean, I'm aware that there was a time when the Kingston Trio were a revolutionary and relatively hip group.

**Ann Wilson** (6:19)
Yes.

**Jesse Thorn** (6:19)
But if you're going to play an acoustic guitar and sing folk songs and also try to rebel, you have a sort of limited palette. And the times they are changing is one of the options.

**Ann Wilson** (6:32)
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 softcore sort of Paul Simon way of rebelling the sounds of silence way.

**Jesse Thorn** (6:52)
Did it occur to you that you 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?

**Ann Wilson** (7:08)
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 is going to know it. That's kind of what we felt when Nancy was eight and I was four years older.