Heart lead singer Ann Wilson is shown during a past concert.
Heart lead singer Ann Wilson is shown during a past concert.
Ann Wilson, lead singer of the iconic pop-rock group Heart, had no time to warm up before a recent solo TV appearance on “The Kelly Clarkson Show.”
“It was way too early in the morning for that,” joked Wilson, speaking by phone from her home in northern Florida.
Fans never noticed. Afterward, they gushed in superlatives online over the 71-year-old vocalist’s powerful pipes that made her and sister Nancy a pop-rock mainstay of the 1970s and beyond.
A YouTube clip of her duet with Clarkson of the Heart classic “Almost Paradise” triggered comments such as “Ann Wilson is like a fine wine. How is it possible to sound better than you did in the 1970s?? Amazing!”
Wilson offered gracious thank yous for hearing such praise as if it were something novel since Heart changed the male-dominated harder-rock music scene in 1973.
“There’s really no magic bullet for the vocals,” said Wilson, who once offered to audition for a spot in Led Zeppelin. “It’s really just a matter of trying to sing in the correct way. I don’t scream or anything like that. I don’t try to sound gravelly or gruff. I just normally try to have lots of sleep and lots of water.”
Wilson, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with her sibling and bandmates in 2013, brings her solo tour to spotlight her new album “Fierce Bliss” to Brown County Music Center in nearby Nashville on June 28. The show is expected to include a few tunes from the latest disc, a few pop-rock covers such as Queen’s “Love of My Life,” and a collection of Heart hits, the last segment of which seems like a pretty winning preview of next year’s planned Heart 50th anniversary tour.
With 33 million records sold and such a monstrous string of Heart hits — “Magic Man,” “Crazy On You,” “Baracuda,” “What About Love?” “These Dreams,” “Never,” “All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You,” “Dog and Butterfly,” and plenty others — it seems as if it would be impossible to create a concert setlist that would leave much room for new material.
Especially considering that her covers in recent years range from tunes from artists ranging from Alice In Chains to Peter Gabriel.
“The trick is to come up with a set list that pleases the audience but also mostly pleases me,” Wilson said. “Because I don’t want to get up there and just phone it in. I want to be able to love what I’m doing because I believe that people who come to see me deserve my best.”
Part of her best might be her sheer durability and continuing visibility in the industry that she feels barely made any time for female artists at all in the 1970s. Today, the business demands touring from artists if they expect a continuing income.
“The music industry has changed so much in recent years as to become unrecognizable,” she said. “One doesn’t make a living anymore from selling albums. You have to make your living now by going out and playing live.
“That becomes a little bit of a challenge because you have to manage to stay healthy, and you really can’t even get a cold.”
She spent much of the pandemic lockdown journaling at home. And much of that became material for the new record. But the push for the new release and the inspiration came when she and husband Dean Wetter rented a tour bus and headed out post-lockdown to cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, her old home area of Seattle, and multiple state parks in between.
She mentioned to Clarkson that the beauty inspired her to create beauty — or at least something new and original, since she has said in past interviews that she never has wanted to simply do Heart victory laps all over the world again and again.
“I have to admit that the show I’m doing right now is as close to actual Heart as you’re going to get this year,” she said.
She took a moment in reference to the current tour to take the spotlight off herself and talk of her musical sidekick Tom Bukovac, whom she calls “someone who is as close to a guitar genius as anyone whom I have ever worked with.” Her backing band, The Amazing Dawgs, is one she has performed with for nearly two years now.
“It’s the best band I’ve ever worked with by far,” she said.
And you’ve got to figure she’s the best vocalist the band members have ever worked with. So good, in fact, that she doesn’t even need to warm up.
