This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing from iHeart Radio.
Still Time Studio.
This is the history making rock band Heart with Crazy on You. Off their nineteen seventy five album Dreamboat Annie with Anne on lead vocals and Nancy on guitar, the Wilson's created a unique mix of rock, pop, and folk that would earn them twenty top forty singles, four Grammy nominations, and sell thirty five million records worldwide. Along the way, Hart went on to become one of the longest lasting and commercially successful bands of all time. Now they are
reuniting for a world tour next week. I'll speak with Heart's lead singer Anne Wilson, but first I'll talk with my guest today, guitarist and vocalist Nancy Wilson. In addition to her numerous accomplishments with Heart, Nancy Wilson also formed the band road Case Royale and as a BAFTA winning film composer. I wanted to know when Nancy and her sister Anne, both Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winners, first started writing music together.
Well, we had many bands before we had Heart. We had little bands called the Viewpoint and Rapunzel and acoustic all girl bands and played at schools and you know, churches and living a lot of living rooms, and we started trying to write as soon as we could play guitars, which was I was about nine or ten when we started trying to write songs. And they were bad songs,
very bad songs. And then when we actually got a real band, somebody that had a van, you know, at a basement and a mom that didn't care, that's when we started to get real serious about writing better songs, because at that point we had audiences and clubs and you know stuff like that, real drums and microphones and amplifiers and things.
Did someone teach you how to play the guitar? Your self taught self taught.
I knew a little bit of piano already, musical family, from the grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, so everybody knew out of harmonize and play ukulele and some piano over here. So we came by it, you know, honestly, to be musicians.
When did you believe you could play the guitar? When do you really start to say I think I got this? I think I can really do this. How old are you.
Well, by the time I've been playing for about six months, I knew I was.
Going to you're nine and a half. Yeah, nine and a half. You conquered it when you're nine and a half.
Well, we saw the Beatles play the Ed Sullivan Show on our black and white grandmother's television in La Jolla, California, you know, like the lunar landing. It was just the moment to be struck by that lightning, and the culture changed it, you know, forever ever since everything the world changed. And so I knew right then I had to have a guitar, and I was good at it right away.
Now you're a famous guitar player. When did you get your hands on your first guitar that you were like, this is more like it.
Well, it was Anne's guitar that I snuck away from her because she had a good one that our grandma gave her when she had mono nucleosis and she was holed up in bed with our other sister, Lynn, and they were trying to get well and doing hobbies like learning how to play guitar. But that was when I could play, So I would sneak it away and try
to learn how to use a good guitar. But I figured she had like just a natural gift from above with her voice, and so with me as the accompanist and her voice, it was a natural like, hey, kids, come on downstairs, we're having a party. Do your ethel Merman imitation, right? So Anne would.
Go, hey, do the ethel Merman as I show. Yeah, so, and I'd be playing it on a guitar. So we started out.
Kind of like a little comedy troupe for our friend parents' parties, and and you know, I guess the rest is history.
But when you say comedy, you mean that you didn't have enough songs, you'd learn, you didn't feel confident enough making it strictly. You wanted to make people laugh and play music correct.
Yeah, it was. It had to be fun obviously when you're young too, you know it's got to be hysterical or it's not worthwhile. So we did comedy skits in the in the garage and plays that we would charge tickets for and do like dance routines to records that we've played. We put on little productions and Anne was always the manager, being the older you know, four years older sister. So we ham hambones, you know, just performing somehow or any way we could perform, we would.
I bet every boy in that neighborhood was there in your yard. They were lying outside your.
Garage five cents for kool aid, you know.
Yeah, popcorn kool aid. Now, when you talk about that performance inclination, and obviously you're very young at the time, you never had any thoughts about acting beyond you know, over the years, how do you ever consider acting acting?
I thought maybe I should try some one time, you know, so because being a goofball and being a handbone, you know, you're just like, well, hey, I'm not afraid of, you know, trying to be goofy in front of people. So at one point when I was married to a writer director, so I got to do a part in a movie you was filming at the time, called say Anything Right. And I'd already been working on music for the films
that he was doing at the time. But I thought, oh, you know, I could try to be an actor, I guess, And so I tried. I failed miserably. It was like not built to be an actor?
Really?
Why?
Why?
Because I don't know how to inhabit someone else's character, I guess, but I do end up, like I tried twice. Another movie I tried to do a bigger speaking part with called The Wildlife. I was a pregnant cops wife that answers the dover and the the other girl was there and I tried to, you know, be real and I've.
Got to go watch this movie The wild Life. So bad.
Yeah, so bad.
I love that I do too.
They're beautifully bad.
Yeah.
Anyway, so I failed miserably, So no acting.
You cut that short pretty early.
Well, I realized, you know, I meant to be a musician and I'm not meant to be an actor. But I do end up having like complete respect. And this is something I wanted to say to you, as an amazing actor yourself, how much I really do have, Like it's incredulous how much work goes into that. Like there's so much to it to be an actor, being able to memorize lines and being able to deliver something as kind of someone else, you know, in a part like that. I have ultimate respect for the job you do.
Well, No, that's very kind. I mean, for me, it's always been the motivation has always been, you know, you just don't think too much about it. When you play a tough role of the person's what I call the negative value and the piece, they're very tough, you know. When you play Hitler, you got to give it everything you've got. You got to play that role and it's tough. You know, you don't want to be that person, but you can't go there. So you just it's like jumping
in the cold water. You just got to go. You just got to do it not really think about it very much.
You have to kind of not think about it.
So you wrote music with Cameron Kevin Crowe. How did that start? How did you start? It was soundtrack or score or both?
Well, No, we had had music, you know, love of music as friends together forever and so it was kind of like we got together as a couple. We were first kind of dating and it was like, Okay, who do you like? Who do you like? He goes, I like the guess who? And it's like, ooh, I'm not sure about the guests who you know, but I kind of grew to love them kind of thanks to Cavin Crowe.
You know.
So we had like music things we would just you know, just talk and talk and talk about music Elton John. And you know, Tiny Dancer was a big song for us, and like we go like, oh, like a puppet cha, you know, like we'd have our Elton John accent singing Elton John.
I want to make you sing a lot of songs now that you open up this can been singing that for us.
Well, I'm I'm going to practice for a thing I'm doing with some of Elton John's players at this benefit for Hillside benefit, like this weekend, so I get to play with Elton. I'm just a super fan. I'm a shameless, giddy super fan around all those guys.
Oh my god, Now, when did you start writing songs that? Actually they're in his films? That begins? When well, that begins?
I started working on his first film, Say Anything, and I worked with there was a scoring artist. I worked with her a little bit in the recording studio to add a guitar part to the score that they were already doing for Say Anything. And I was like, I don't know how to read charts. I'm freaking out because I didn't know how to read charts. I don't read I learned how to read music, but I never used it. So I lost that language along the way because I just had it all in my head on ear, you know.
I'd do everything by ear. So Anne kind of took me in and somebody showed me how to read the chart and how to go D D D, you know, in a scene and say anything. Was like my first foray into scoring with other musicians in a scoring studio.
And you did other films with them as well.
Yeah, and the next one I did was Jerry Maguire by myself. So I had a friend's studio and I I went to Costco. I got a little tiny cassette TV cassette player like VCR and that's what the dailies were printed on at the time. He had a good microphone and a six track reel to reel and so no soundproofing, nothing, just somebody's house in a spare room with you know, garbage trucks and dogs barking.
Outside, and you're on the guitar or the piano on the guitar.
And keyboards and percussion. I did everything wow, and some vocal stuff, but it was like it was like, oh, gotta wait for the garbage truck, you know, to press record. But I would like I would do the countdown on tape to the cassette that I put on this TV that luckily wasn't loud enough to pick up on the microphone, but it was like so loovi. It was ridiculous. There was no time I saw the timecode on the cassette
for the scene. I was recording onto with one really good microphone on a really good guitar in a very noisy room, and it all worked because the guitar was close enough. At one point we used a few mics and spread the guitar sound out like stereo. We filled up the whole tape with one guitar.
And when you do this for people who don't know, you don't wait to watch a cut and the music flows. You're doing it. Scenes are coming, you cut scenes and footage and you're writing stuff to that, or you wait till you get a full cut of the film.
I wrote a lot of stuff to ongoing cuts, like scenes that were changed later, pieces of scenes that I would do music for which I would have to redo
later all over again when it was cut together. But there was still a lot of learning process for me just to try to cut to picture because normally I just you know, play music for songwriting, and so it was an entirely different language to learn for me, how to stay out of the way of a scene where there's a dialogue happening and have not to step on the words, and how to create sort of an atmospheric
like some air around you know. So less is more in a lot of cases, which is one of the biggest lessons I learned about scoring music as opposed to just writing songs for you know, hysterical screaming women kind of songs.
Yeah, could you do almost famous? Well?
I did almost famous. Yeah, I think that was the masterpiece. Really well.
He had a great line to me when I worked with him. We were talking about parenting. I met your sons and we were hanging out one day, and he said to me, something led up to one thing led to another. He goes, well, he is, I try to have some understanding of my kids, considering that their father is an Academy Award winning screenwriter and their mother's in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Bit of pressure, a little bit of pressure.
Yeah, you know, there's there's therapy involved, you know, because I mean, why wouldn't there be, you know, because that's a lot pressure on little guys and there are two twin boys that they're really good people. Thank God for that, because we managed to do something right along the way.
But but you know, being being hard working archest type people, creatives that it doesn't really allow for just your everyday average I mean, and I always made a dinner table, I always lit candles, we always had dinner together.
Hearts Nancy Wilson. If you enjoy conversations with gifted rockers, be sure to check out my episode with musician Patti Smith.
I didn't really come into the music business. I wound up in music by mistake. I'm not really a musician. I didn't really want to be a musician or a singer. I wanted to be a poet and a writer. And it was accidental. So would it accidentally happen now? I don't think so. I think I would have to be more focused on what I wanted. But also because I'm so untechnological, I mean, I'm just not really suited for right now, so probably I would have to be like a physicist.
Drove of the band the game. Oh you don't even drive.
No, I don't know how to drive, so I couldn't do that.
Hear more of my conversation with Patti Smith that Here's the Thing dot org. After the break, Nancy Wilson shares how things have changed for women in the industry since she started out and how it feels to be one of the founding women of rock. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing wish This is You and Me, the title track from Nancy Wilson's twenty twenty
one debut solo album, Who Is You and Me? And Me for decades playing sold out stadiums and recording hit records was another day on the job for the members of Heart. I wanted to know how Nancy Wilson felt about juggling the demands of her music career while raising her children with then husband director Cameron Crowe.
Well, the scheduling of trying to be together yeah, really challenging. The idea going in was, okay, if we have kids, we'll take one project at a time and the other person stays song. But that's not really how you try. You try to do that doesn't work out, It doesn't work as well as you want it to work. Getting together we made a big point of always, you know, when we were all together, we would really be together and not just go and do stuff that was distracting.
We would hang out and almost the favorite story I have even after we were not married anymore, but I had the kids at my place. I lived in Topanga Canyon for a while. There was a big power out, like there always is in Topanga. The power went out, and the boys were there and I lit the fire, lit the candles and had the lanterns. It's like, well, I could light the stove and I could still make dinner.
So let's tell ghost stories. So you know. So we had the candles, we had the firelight, and we told stories, and then we had a story contest and each person went around and told let's pick categories. So it was really a great thing when the power went out, because it was a beautiful life lesson and a learning, you know, an instructional moment for them as well as for me as a parent, about taking all the artifice away and just being together.
Now, questions are going to go hand in hand. One is some of these female goddesses of music precede you by a few years, and some of them are you know, right around you know your time. You're talking about Stevie Nicks, and then before you, Grace Slick and Janis Joplin, Linda Ronstadt and so forth. For you, was it I mean, let's face it, your sister and you both during your heyday were these gorgeous women. And we talked to your sister about, you know, the difficulties of that, about how
women lived in that world back then. Was it tough where people it's the word impolite untoward, Yes.
I mean it was a different era. Men were way less evolved the pre feminization of men. Yes, but I think it was just part for the course. And we didn't really care because we were military brats from the Marine Corps, like a Marine Corps aristocracy, to be honest. And so a grand dad was a brigadier general with four stars, and our uncle and our granddad other granddad and our dad was a military you know star and also the conductor of the military band as well. So
and so we had this kind of breviera. I think we were just burly girls, you know that just didn't take the guff.
You're confident, Yeah, we.
Were just confident. We kind of felt like one of the guys. We didn't have brothers, so guys in bands were kind of became our brothers, and we were equal, we felt equal. We wanted democracy, We wanted a democracy of a band with men. And our influences were not Janis Choplin. They were Jimmy Page, you know. So our heroes and our muses were more the rock guys. So we wanted to be able to kind of transform or you know, be gender free, you know, not gender specific.
Well, it seems like there's a reality when you're home, you're treated a certain way with respect, and everything is much more decent and honest at home. And then when you go out to the filthy cesspool of rock and roll music ticket sales, then it's a different thing with the people are just animals. I mean, they're just they don't get it. But then when you do that and you're enduring all those things that they're well, that's obviously what I've gotten. But what you see now is these
monolithic stars, female stars. The biggest names in music now are women. It's obviously Taylor Swift and Beyonce, Miley Cyrus. I mean, all of the biggest acts today are female acts.
Boy genus, boy genius.
You like, oh yeah, when you see them put together these I don't want to say bubble or world, but operation. They got an operation in which they're taken care of. I think a lot of the crap that women had to put up with has been subtracted from their lives. They've set up a system, they've set up an organization where that doesn't even come into the picture, the way they're treated, you know.
Yeah, well that's a really good point. I mean, I think that's really true, and I'm really happy things have changed, really happy about that. I mean, things have evolved in a really positive direction.
If you're making money, by the way, and they're.
Making yeah, they're changing the world economy basically too, so like Taylor Swift, but I'm really glad for that. I'm really kind of proud in a certain way, amazing to have been a bit of a founder for some of that stuff.
Yes, but also let me just say this, which is you pioneer that and I don't think you would have pioneered it as well or as effectively if you weren't so good. I mean, Hard as a band that people love, love and play their music and just go nuts say this that music is really important to them. So I'm wondering when you go out on stage for the first time, or when you go into a studio for the first time without your sister. Now you're on your own. When was the time you first went on stage to perform
and it was Nancy Wilson alone? When was that and what was that like for you?
The first real time was after the pandemic, I think. I mean, I've done sit ins with such Pearl Jam and sat in with you know, various Seattle friends and bands in Seattle, but to perform after the pandemic solo. The first time I really went out there to a big audience was in Seattle at the performance center called ben Arroya Hall with the Seattle Symphony. So hey, no pressure, just the Seattle Symphony.
You know.
It was like at the end of the first half of the pandemic. I guess there was a windover of time when it was everybody was still wearing masks, but it was okay for a minute to go do stuff. So I had made a solo album in my home studio remotely with the other members of the band in Heart that were in Heart at the time, and released a solo album called You and Me and So I went. I agreed to do this big sold out show at the Benaroya Hall with a Seattle Symphony, and I walked
out there. It was like, oh, oh yeah, I've been sucking my house for about a year. You know, Oh I remember being on stage. Now, why are my knees shaking? You know, like, But it took a couple songs, and by the time I was in to the show, you know, just got over the hello, I'm here, I'm on a stage. How are you? It was really nerve wracky.
And how was it without her? Meaning you're used to performing with a certain group of people, whether they're related to you or not. What was it like to go out and do that without your partner?
Well, it was freeing. I like to talk about songs when I'm going to do them on stage, so I ended up getting really talkative on stage as a solo artist with Nancy Wilson's Heart, the various forms that I
took the last four years. I go into a song called Mistral Wind and I tell usually I've been telling the story of the Great Ulysses, which is kind of what the song is about, where you know, an innocent individual gets in a boat, goes out on life's journey, you know, to encounter the worst storm they'll ever survive, and the sirens will be calling from the rocks, and the ship almost crashes on the rocks and you nearly die.
And then if you tie yourself to the mast and resist all of the temptations of evil, then you might finally find yourself floating into a calm lagoon where your life has changed forever. You'll never be the same, but you live to tell, you know, the tale of great ulysses in a nutshell. Something simple, something simple like that.
Yeah, musician Nancy Wilson, if you're enjoying this conversation, tell a friend and be sure to follow Here's the Thing on the iHeartRadio app, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. When we come back, Nancy Wilson shares why the guitar is her best friend. I'm Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing, don't you suppy? That's Nancy Wilson performing I'll Find You, from her twenty twenty one album
You and Me. It may seem that both Anne and Nancy Wilson were always destined to be Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees. As members of the band Heart, But life almost took Nancy down another path when she attended college in the Pacific Northwest.
Well, I was really ambitious with my studies. I really had a wild eyed idea that I would learn Russian as well as German, and I would be proficient at creative writing classes. And I was taking some of the required like chemistry stuff. So I was really overly ambitious about all of it.
What was it about you that you were seeking something in that way?
I was really inspired at the time by Sue Ennis, our then collaborator. She had gone to Berkeley, and she was in grad school at Berkeley, and she was turning me onto all these really great books and concepts and Carlos Costeneda and all kinds of really mind expanding, you know,
without the drugs, which we'd already tried. How to spell, how to write a paper, how to research a paper, and write about things that I wanted to know about, like Romantic tradition and European history and stuff that I figured I would bring back to my own creative song writing skills when I joined Heart after I took some of those classes, so I was I was playing acoustic solo shows at a little bar called the Pepper Grinder down the street from the university with my guitar that
you know that I was earning enough money to buy records with and play records in my dorm room with. So it was just, you know, I guess I was really like romanticized college girl. Kind of a college girl. I was just romantic with it. I would play my music, and I would write my poetry and write my creative writing and do my studies and you know, and it was a girl's dorm. There was no co ed at the time, so you know, I even got in trouble with the other with the at the boys dorm one
time at a party. I mean, it was just like all of the stuff, being a younger sister of three sisters to get my own declaration of independence as an individual before I joined NaN's band, because I'd been her shadow for the most part, the youngest all my life. So I figured I'm going to go get some skills before I joined the rock band, and that's what I did.
Why isn't your sister Liz in the act? Would you say?
Lynn's musically inclined? She fell in love like the first year she went to college. She fell in love and got pregnant right away. So she married a guy that helped him get out of the Vietnam War draft. So she kind of went a different journey.
She had a boy or a girl.
She had two boys, two boys.
Now, well, the time we have left. When you write music, when you've written music with heart before and beyond in your life, now, what do you think is the thing you gravitate to more naturally? Like I'm the biggest fan and of love songs depending on who crafted them. Like I always say to people like, you know, Stevie Wonder wrote the most beautiful love songs. I can listen to his music all day long and create him.
You know, all is fair in love.
And in the sky and songs like that. Yeah, But for you, it's like, what music do you gravitate more towards love songs? Heartache? What's what's the music that comes out of you more readily?
Well, love songs are heartache. Okay, not always that's true, but you know, happy little songs, there's always got to be an element of melancholy. For me, I think I really gravitate towards the complexity of what a love song can be like, you know, I'm reading Bernie Taupin's book Scatter Shop right now, and I'm getting close to the end of it. It's so cool to see his take on his lyric writing as a songwriter, because Tiny Dancer is such a great love song. But I don't know.
I think be a songwriter, you're always basically writing about love in one way or another, whether or not you're angry with someone or you want you know, you're imploring something out of someone for more understanding or more connection somehow with the world or with their world. So I don't know. I think heartbreak is the best inspiration in
many ways for writing music. And if you're a sensitive creative type person, you know, which is a blessing and a super curse, you're going to feel all of it and you're going to try to write about it, which is no easy to ask.
Now, when you were you united with your sister recently to perform together again, How did that feel when you stepped out there with her again and performed.
It was really cool. I kind of keep saying this about it because we're gonna go on a big tour sure starting in April, a world tour actually, and we just did a few shows around. On New Year's Eve, we played in Seattle. It was a hometown you know, kids, kind of victory lap and it felt so it feels so good to be on a stage with her because we have a shorthand, we have each other's secret code, secret language that we speak, and we know each other
so well. You don't even have to say anything. You just see their face and you go, oh, okay, oh gotcha. It's so natural. It's you know, everything else that swirls around the camp of getting a heart. The big metal machine of heart started up again, is way more complicated than the actual nucleus, the center, the eye of the hurricane itself, which is me and Anne.
I hope you're doing your pilates. Oh yes, I'm getting ready to get out there.
I'm strength training and all kinds of pilates.
Part is not Dan Fogelberg, You know what I mean. We need a little energy here, We need some energy. We need we need to be bouncing around every now and then.
You know, well, you know me, I like my rocker size. Yeah, I do my rocker side. So I'm I'm I've got a trainer. I'm actually working out with a trade.
Ready like Mick Jaggs. He's getting ready.
Oh man, can you imagine bounce?
He's still bouncing now. My last question for you, which of course is from our special consultant who came on his guy. I said, a mom with her today, said do you have a question to ask? He said, ask her? How is it she can play that guitar so well and she rarely practices.
Oh that's a good question. Well, of course it's a good question, right. What practices for me is trying to write a new song. So when I come back to the guitar, it's like, wow, it's a reunion and I'm trying something new out and I've learned something here that I didn't even know before because I'm not trying to practice what I already know.
It's a great answer. They go hand in hand. The relationship with the guitar is also embedded in songwriting.
Yeah, for me, it is, and it's a best friend relationship. It's always a discovery of how's your day going. Well, here's how my day's going. And I'm going to sound like this today because you are talking to me about what we're talking about together, me and the guitar. So it's definitely. Yeah, it's my best friend. It says things for me that I want to say.
Well, let me just say, man, I love you solo. I love your sister solo, but I like the two of you together. I mean, you guys are one of the greatest rock and roll acts of all time. And the range, you know, just I mean, obviously there's all these hits, and there's beautiful ballads in there as well. I mean, Dog and Butterflies, such a gorgeous song. You guys together is something I think everybody's gonna be excited about. Come April. You go on tour in April.
Correct, in April. On the twentieth or fort show, it is true that there's a perception about heart that only really exists when the two of us are together. That is what heart is.
Barry Gibb was on the show and we talked about blood harmony. Yeah, and when you talk sometimes you sound like Anne give a very similar tambur to your voices.
You know, we're getting a film together about our story, which is not easy. We're trying to get a writer foot to it. But people say, you know, who would play you? You know, if you're doing a movie about heart, and right now, I mean, I know El Fanning can sing, and so I've think in El Fanning and Dakota for and would be so interesting of a pair up because they're sisters too.
Yeah. Blood harmony, blood harmony. Right, all my best to you, Thank you so much, big.
Love back at you, and thank you so much.
My thanks to Nancy Wilson. You can find more information about Heart's world tour at heartdash music dot com. I'll leave you with a little more of Crazy on You off their nineteen seventy five album Dreamboat Annie. I'm Alec Baldwin. Here's the thing is brought to you by iHeart Radio.