Heart Ready to Move Past ‘Family Drama’ as Tour Kicks Off
This weekend, Heart will hit the road for a tour featuring both Ann and Nancy Wilson for the first time since 2019.
The band’s return is exciting for fans, and also reflects the mended relationship between the Wilson sisters.
“We’re talking. We’re fine together. We just felt it, so why not?” Ann explained during a conversation with Billboard. “The common ground is that we both want it to be excellent and we both want it to be absolutely Heart. We just basically put it together and said, ‘Let’s go!'”
An assortment of factors led to the band’s break. In 2016, Ann's husband was arrested for allegedly hitting one of Nancy's children. After a short hiatus, Ann and Nancy came together again for a 2019 trek, but tension between the sisters reportedly lingered.
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“There’s so many things, circumstantially, since 2019,” Nancy noted to Billboard. “A lot of it’s just family drama and unavoidable, and just other stuff people wanted to do besides Heart. So we were off doing our own things for a little while, and there was also this little interruption called the pandemic.”
What Have Ann and Nancy Wilson Been Doing Outside of Heart?
Since they last toured together, Ann and Nancy have each released solo material. The latter also toured under the moniker Nancy Wilson’s Heart in 2022 and ‘23. Still, both women admit “the actual Heart” comes when both of them are in the lineup.
The sisters most recently played together at the end of 2023, marking their first Heart performance together since 2019. A full tour announcement soon followed. In their conversation with Billboard, Nancy also noted one other motivating factor.
“You know, I just turned the big 7-0 [on March 16], so it’s like, ‘Whoa … If I ever want to get a chance to do this amazingly fun thing one more time, now is the time.'”
Will Heart Release New Music?
In addition to their sprawling tour, which starts April 20, the Wilson sisters are eying new Heart music.
“The thing that we really hope to achieve is to maybe write some more stuff together,” Ann admitted. “We don’t have plans for that right now. We don’t really plan too far in the future; we’re not calculating like that. We’re just gonna do this tour and see what comes. But I think if a song comes out of a situation, it’ll be a real good one, ’cause it’ll be authentic. It’s just a matter of me and Nancy getting our heads around that.”
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Nancy added that she’d gone back through some of the band’s demos and found “a couple unfinished things” that she hopes to revisit.
“There’s one really, really cool song called ‘Sweet Deceiver,’ but the words were never right, so we never recorded it properly,” the guitarist revealed. “I think I might want to finish that song; I’ve been trying to think of new chorus lyrics ever since I heard the demo. I would love to write some new stuff, too.”
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Gallery Credit: Annie Zaleski