ANN WILSON

ANN WILSON INTERVIEW.
ALL QUOTES BY ANN WILSON.

When we were putting the band together in the early ’70’s, everybody wanted to hear Led Zeppelin songs. When we were playing the bars up in Canada, that’s what everybody who was coming out to see us wanted to hear anything by Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Slade.

Those groups music were a teaching influence for us. Heart has been on hiatus for some time now, I’m taking the band out on the road this summer because I want to play and road test some new songs. My sister will not be there because she’s planning on having a baby and her doctor says no touring while she’s planning starting a family. So it’s going to be Heart, featuring me. It’s really a good band. We’ve been rehearsing and we’re all pleased with the way the music sounds.

So we’re going to go out this summer and play some shows. It’s going to be a kind of an on the edge kind of deal. The show is way more bare bones and it’s a lot more raw. To me that’s like going home. There will be some Heart songs that people are familiar with, there’ll be some surprises and then there’ll be some new stuff that we’ve just written that we’ll be testing. You’ll hear the stuff you want to hear and also you’ll get some new stuff thrown at you.

We’re not just out to get your buck by playing all the old stiff one more time.

We’re label shopping right now. Epic record, our old label, is putting out an album that contains some songs from the ’70’s when we were on Epic. It’s got one new Heart song on it. The bands up here in Seattle make one bones about the fact that they loved the stuff we did in the ’70’s and they really hated the stuff we did in the ’80’s (she laughs). They say ,’What ever happened to you guys in the ’80’s?’ I’ll hear thing like, ‘When I was two years old I used to listen to “Barracuda” (she laughs). That’s what got me interested in playing guitar.’ I don’t believe in there’s much value in resting on our laurels. We’re working on shopping for a new record deal and we have some new material ready for our next album.

We’re never going to go back to what we were doing in the ’80’s.

We’re moving forward we’re not going backward. We didn’t write a lot of our own hits in that time period. We were working with a lot of big name record producers who kind of made decisions over our heads. When you’re in that situation, you don’t see what’s happening to you. You just do one thing that somebody asks you to do in the studio and that produces really incredible results. That produces a Number 1 single for you so you do it again. Pretty soon, you turn around and look at the situation and realize, while you’ve been very successful pulling in tons of dough, but you haven’t had one single one of one of your own songs as a single for years (she laughs). Don’t get me wrong,the ’80’s were fun. I’m not saying it was a big drag totally. It’s just that it’s time to move on and get back to being our own artist. I just wouldn’t want to sound that way again with those big banks of synthesizers and walls of glossy reverb and echo. That’s not really were I want to go with our music. We definitely are really excited about doing our own songs, we’re very prolific right now.