“Everybody wanted to be a fabulous disaster,” Ann Wilson says, laughing but not really joking. “Nobody wanted to be healthy and clean and wholesome.” That might be the most distilled description of 1970s rock stardom ever uttered, and like most things Ann says, it’s delivered with equal parts grace, grit, and total clarity.
The Heart frontwoman has had more than her share of lives in music—siren of ‘70s rock, ‘80s hitmaker, ‘90s survivor—and she’s back again with a series of new singles that show zero signs of slowing down. Zeppelin swagger? She’s got it on “Black Wing.” Political fire? Check out her Steve Earle cover, “The Revolution Starts Now.” A grunge elegy? Enter “Rooster,” which Wilson rips through in honor of her late friend Layne Staley. Yes, she knew him. Yes, he dove like a ballet dancer in her backyard pool. No, you never knew that either.
“Layne was an amazing guy… probably a little bit too much so to be in the world,” she says. “Highly sensitive and intelligent and complicated. He was a diver. That swimmer’s body, but strong. I remember watching him out there doing these spectacular dives and just thinking, ‘Who is this person?’”
This new chapter finds Wilson in reflective mode but not nostalgic. She’s writing, recording, jamming—sometimes with Gov’t Mule’s Warren Haynes, sometimes in Muscle Shoals with Vince Gill, and sometimes just watching seabirds fly over the river by her house and turning that into a metaphor for our collective pandemic collapse. “Black Wing” came out of that. “It’s the ultimate quarantine song,” she says. “Somebody who’s stuck in a place, watching the freedom of a bird overhead, carrying messages of the world’s insanity from a very pure place.”
And it jams—hard. “The guys really hit it. After the song part was over, I just said, ‘Keep going,’ and they really took it somewhere.”
If you're wondering if all these songs add up to a new album, don’t count on it. “I tend to think it’s more interesting to release them one by one,” she says. “Serving up a whole big Thanksgiving dinner on a heaping plate? I’d rather people dive into each one.”
That includes recent Muscle Shoals sessions, which may not sound like Muscle Shoals. “I didn’t do any vintage soul there,” she clarifies. “It’s just a really good rock room with a magical sort of vibe. And I think the biggest part of the magic is that the people who go in there think it’s magic. So it is.”
She’s also eyeing the long game. There’s a movie in the works about Heart. She’s writing with Haynes. There’s a duet with Vince Gill. And she’s not hanging it up any time soon. “Some of the musicians I know who are my age are going, ‘Better gracefully retire to Boot Hill.’ And I just don’t know how to do that.”
As for her sister Nancy and the future of Heart? “She’s living her life and I’m living mine,” Ann says, matter-of-factly. “We haven’t written together in a while. But when the time is right, I imagine we will.”
Until then, Wilson is just going to keep moving forward, singing the songs, mourning the ghosts of Seattle, and avoiding Boot Hill. “I’ve been doing this since I was 14. I’m just going to keep going as long as I have something worthwhile to say.”
Spoiler alert: she still does.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the tracks below.
