The story of Heart

Marine kids who wanted to be the Beatles

Ann Wilson was born in San Diego on the nineteenth of June 1950, and her little sister Nancy arrived in San Francisco on the sixteenth of March 1954. There was an older sister too, Lynn. Their father, John Wilson, was a Marine Corps officer, so the family moved constantly, living in Southern California and Taiwan before he retired and settled them in Bellevue, a suburb of Seattle. Music was the thing that made every new house feel like home. Nancy remembered Sunday mornings of pancakes and opera, with their dad conducting in the living room, and records ranging from Ray Charles and Judy Garland to bossa nova and early electronic music.[1] [2] [3]

The moment that changed everything came on the ninth of February 1964, when the sisters watched the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Nancy later described it as a lightning bolt. Almost at once they were playing air guitar in the living room and faking English accents. In August 1966 they saw the Beatles live at the Seattle Center Coliseum, and that same year Ann won first prize in a newspaper essay contest about the band, taking home a camera. Years later the sisters liked to say they never wanted to be the Beatles' girlfriends. They wanted to be the Beatles.[1] [2] [3]

Ann's childhood was not easy. She had a bad stutter and was bullied for her weight, and she was painfully shy. Her mother, Lou, believed music was what drew her out, and the stammer began to fade once she picked up a guitar. Ann bought her first instrument, a Kent acoustic, with money from her grandmother. Nancy's own guitar would not stay in tune, so she borrowed Ann's. At Sammamish High School, where their father taught English, Ann met Sue Ennis, a fellow Beatles fanatic who would become the sisters' lifelong friend and one of Heart's most important songwriters.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sisters' first group was a four part harmony act called the Viewpoints, which made its debut at a folk festival on Vashon Island in 1967. They were not paid, but people sat on folding chairs, so they counted it as professional. At one church youth event they played Peter, Paul and Mary and The Doors, and the anti war mood of the set offended so many people that more than half the audience walked out. Around 1969 Ann recorded a tiny single in Seattle as part of a group called the Daybreaks. Its B side, Through Eyes and Glass, was the first song the sisters ever wrote together, pressed in an edition of five hundred.[1] [2]

The Army, a draft dodger and the road to Vancouver

Heart began as a boys' band. In the late sixties a bassist named Steve Fossen and a guitarist named Roger Fisher were playing high schools and taverns around Bothell, northeast of Seattle, in a group called the Army. Roger's older brother Mike acted as their manager and booked the gigs. The band changed members and names more than once, becoming Hocus Pocus and then White Heart, a play on an Arthur C. Clarke story collection called Tales from the White Hart. They swapped the deer for the organ in the spelling, and eventually trimmed the name to just Heart.[1] [2] [3]

Mike Fisher was due to be drafted for the Vietnam War. According to Nancy, when he failed to report, his home was raided, and he slipped out of a back window and fled to Canada. On a visit back across the border he walked into a gig by his little brother's band and saw their new singer, Ann Wilson. Ann later recalled sitting on the dance floor in old jeans with a cigarette and a glass of wine, learning a Janis Joplin song. They fell for each other. Ann was scared at first, but eventually she followed Mike to Vancouver, and the band followed her.[1] [2] [3]

Life in Canada was hard. Ann described the band living together in a single room, eating brown rice, with Steve and Roger's wives there too and Steve's small child. The middle class girl from Bellevue suddenly found herself washing her hair in cold water and cooking for everyone. Mike Fisher had the business head. He drove the truck, and with Roger and Steve he built the band's equipment by hand. The plan was simple and methodical. Earn enough for a truck, then better gear, then a record, and only then move back to the States.[1]

Ann kept begging her sister to join. Nancy was studying in Oregon and then at the University of Washington, and playing solo acoustic sets of Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon songs at student unions. In 1974 she finally gave in and moved to West Vancouver. Some of the men resisted, so she was made to audition by sitting in, and her test was to learn the intricate acoustic introduction to Clap, a piece by the guitarist of Yes. She played it with the band at a tavern the next night and was in. Soon afterwards she and Roger Fisher became a couple, so now two Fisher brothers were dating two Wilson sisters.[1] [2] [3]

Little Led Zeppelin and Dreamboat Annie

In the Vancouver clubs Heart earned a reputation as a covers band that could play Led Zeppelin better than almost anyone, and people started calling them Little Led Zeppelin. They had a regular gig at a club called Lucifer's. According to the sisters' memoir, in March 1975 they were onstage playing Stairway to Heaven when Led Zeppelin themselves walked in after a show at the Pacific Coliseum. Every Canadian label and several American ones had turned Heart down. The door finally opened at Mushroom, a small Vancouver company that owned its own studio.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At Mushroom the band found two crucial allies. Mike Flicker was the studio's chief engineer, and Howard Leese, his old bandmate from Los Angeles, worked alongside him. They helped cut a demo, Flicker became Heart's producer, and Leese joined on guitar and keyboards. Drummer Michael Derosier soon made the line up complete. Flicker heard potential in songs that were not yet finished. Ann said he was the first person to really hear what they were doing. His work on the debut album, Dreamboat Annie, won him the Juno Award in Canada for producer of the year.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Two songs made Heart. Magic Man was Ann's story of falling for Mike Fisher, a young woman leaving her worried mother for an older man who cast a spell on her. Crazy on You grew out of nights with Mike in what Ann called a Tolkien house, brooding over Vietnam and the chaos of the early seventies. Nancy was down with the flu when Ann brought her the lyric, and it lifted her out of her sick bed. Borrowing the fiery strumming of the Moody Blues song Question, Nancy then spent days working out the acoustic introduction that everyone now recognizes in a single bar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dreamboat Annie came out in Canada in September 1975. A Montreal FM station picked up Magic Man, and in October Heart were offered a slot opening for Rod Stewart at the Montreal Forum the day before the show, flying across the country overnight to make it. The album was released in the United States on Valentine's Day 1976. Crazy on You reached number thirty five and Magic Man climbed to number nine on the Billboard Hot 100. The album hit number seven and sold over a million copies. At a time when rock was almost entirely male, two women were writing, singing and playing their own music.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Barracuda and the war with Mushroom

Success soured the band's relationship with its label. When Heart asked for a royalty rate fitting a platinum act, Mushroom refused, and Mike Flicker walked out. Then, in the issue of Rolling Stone dated the thirtieth of December 1976, Mushroom ran a full page advertisement mocked up like a tabloid front page. It used a bare shouldered photo of the sisters from the album cover session, with a caption joking that it was only their first time. Nobody had asked the band. Ann later said that to the executives it was a clever sales trick, but that she and Nancy, raised by a feminist mother, felt violated.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Soon afterwards, at an after show party, a promotion man asked Ann how her lover was. She assumed he meant Mike Fisher and said Mike was great. He smirked and said he meant her sister. Ann was furious. She stormed up to her hotel room and wrote the words of Barracuda in one burst. Nancy added music, and Roger Fisher and Michael Derosier supplied a galloping riff. The song became Heart's calling card, a snarling hard rock track that reached number eleven in 1977. Nancy later said it began as personal revenge but became universal, because there are barracudas everywhere.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heart argued that their contract required Flicker as producer, so without him they were free, and they signed with Portrait, a new CBS label. Mushroom insisted it was owed a second album. It took five unfinished studio tracks and some old live recordings from a Seattle tavern, remixed them without the band, and released them in April 1977 as Magazine, with a disclaimer on the back cover. Heart went to court. A Seattle court ordered the record recalled after around fifty thousand copies were pressed, but also ruled that the band still owed Mushroom an album.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile Portrait released Little Queen in May 1977, with Barracuda leading the way, and it became Heart's second million seller. That summer they played Bill Graham's Day on the Green in Oakland in front of fifty thousand people, on a bill with Steve Miller and the Eagles. In March 1978 the band spent four days at Sea West Studios in Seattle reworking Magazine, remixing, editing and adding new vocals, with a court ordered guard watching over the master tapes. The approved version came out in April 1978 and went platinum. For a while all three Heart albums were on the charts at once.[1] [2] [3]

Dog and Butterfly, and two couples come apart

For the fourth album the sisters worked closely with Sue Ennis, then a doctoral student in German literature at Berkeley, who became a key co writer. Dog and Butterfly arrived in late 1978, split into a rocking dog side and a gentler butterfly side, closing with the seven minute epic Mistral Wind. Straight On reached number fifteen and the title track number thirty four, and the album went double platinum. Howard Leese predicted that Mistral Wind, with its strange time signatures, was the song people would remember them by. Steve Fossen called it the culmination of everything they had dreamed about.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Behind the music, things were falling apart. Heart was run by two couples, and some of the crew resented how much power the Fisher brothers had. Roger Fisher has admitted he was unfaithful to Nancy on the road, and they split. Roger stayed in the band for about a year afterwards, which everyone agrees was miserable, and it got worse when Nancy began dating the drummer, Michael Derosier. By Nancy's account the tension ended with Roger smashing a guitar onstage and throwing part of it at her in a dressing room.[1] [2] [3]

In October 1979 the rest of the band used a clause in their corporate agreement to vote the Fisher brothers out. Manager Ken Kinnear phoned Roger at a restaurant in eastern Washington to give him the news. Roger has said it came as a huge relief. That same month Ann's nine year relationship with Mike Fisher ended too, after it emerged that he had also been unfaithful. One morning she called her mother, her sister and Sue Ennis, they loaded her belongings into her Land Rover, and in six hours it was over. The tears, she said, lasted a lot longer.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ann, Nancy and Sue moved in together in a house in the woods outside Seattle that Sue called a girls' dorm. Losing Roger's showy guitar playing left a hole onstage, and his parts were split between Nancy and Howard Leese, which gave Nancy far more room to play lead. Ann's mother worried about her daughter, who suffered terrible nerves before shows. Mike Fisher used to walk Ann to the stage every night, and Lou Wilson wondered aloud who would walk her out now. Ann later summed up that period by saying the emotional toll simply ate them.[1] [2] [3]

Bebe le Strange and the lean years

Bebe le Strange came out in February 1980 and reached number five, with the horn section of Tower of Power on the single Even It Up. The front cover was a close up of Ann and Nancy, and the men were placed on the back, pictured inside the sisters' hair. Nancy later said that really angered them. At the end of that year Heart's cover of the old Aaron Neville hit Tell It Like It Is climbed to number eight, their biggest single yet, and the Greatest Hits Live double album went double platinum. In May 1982 they opened for Queen at Elland Road in Leeds.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Private Audition in 1982 was the first album without Mike Flicker. It was produced in house, credited under the nicknames Connie and Howie, and it stalled at number twenty five, a flop by their standards, though the tour still sold well. On that tour the opening act was John Cougar, and when Jack and Diane went to number one he suggested that since his album was a hit and theirs was a turkey, they should swap places. The sisters pointed out the tour had sold out before he was even booked. After the sessions Steve Fossen and Michael Derosier were gone, replaced by Mark Andes and Denny Carmassi.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

At the record company's insistence, the next album, Passionworks in 1983, was made with the producer Keith Olsen, with members of Toto helping out on keyboards. It reached only number thirty nine. Rolling Stone compared it to the soundtrack of an off Broadway show that closed after two nights. Nancy has been blunt about what was going on. She said that in those years everything they did had a white sheen of cocaine over it, the albums, the videos and their lives, and that it stripped the humor out of their music. After Passionworks, CBS dropped Heart.[1] [2] [3]

The Capitol comeback and two number ones

Heart were widely thought to be finished, but the Capitol Records executive Don Grierson believed in them, on one condition. They would record songs by outside hit writers. Ann later called it a devil's bargain, saying you had to swallow hard and find something to like in songs that had no substance. It worked spectacularly. The album Heart, released in June 1985 and produced by Ron Nevison, went to number one and sold five million copies. What About Love, first recorded by the Canadian band Toronto, came back to the top ten with Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas of Starship singing backup.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Never reached number four, then These Dreams went all the way to number one on the twenty second of March 1986. It was written by Bernie Taupin and Martin Page and had been turned down by Stevie Nicks. It was also the first Heart single with Nancy singing lead, and she had to fight for it because some thought it did not sound like Heart. On the day she recorded her vocal, a twenty two year old fan named Sharon Hess, who was dying of leukemia, came to meet the sisters. She loved the song, Nancy dedicated it to her in the album notes, and Sharon died days after the final mixes.[1] [2] [3]

The eighties image came with a cruel side. Ann had gained weight, and record executives and even bandmates pushed her to lose it. In the videos, camera angles and clothes were used to hide her size and the focus shifted to Nancy. Ann has said she had starved herself and used diet pills in the seventies, and that the attention now brought on stress and panic attacks. On the 1987 tour Ann began having moments of stage fright, and Nancy would step forward and play an unplanned guitar solo to buy her sister time to recover.[1] [2]

Bad Animals arrived in 1987, named after the band's own dishevelled look in hotel lobbies, sunglasses on and exhausted from touring. Its lead single Alone, written by Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly and first recorded by their obscure duo i Ten, spent three weeks at number one and became Heart's biggest hit. Who Will You Run To reached number seven. The album went to number two in America and gave Heart their first top ten album in Britain, where the tour sold out three nights at Wembley Arena. The UK success sent their earlier singles back into the charts.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Brigade in 1990 was the last album built around outside writers. Its lead single, All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You, was written by Mutt Lange and reached number two. It tells of a woman who picks up a hitchhiker in order to get pregnant, and it stirred controversy over whether it encouraged women to take risks. Ann hated it. She said it stood for everything the band wanted to get away from and called its message hideous, but there was heavy pressure to record it. It became Heart's only single certified gold, and Brigade reached number three in both America and Britain.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lovemongers, grunge and a long pause

When the Gulf War began, the sisters were asked to play a Red Cross benefit, but most of the band had been let go. So Ann, Nancy, Sue Ennis and their friend Frank Cox formed an acoustic group and called it the Lovemongers, a jab at war mongering. With no drummer, they brought a cardboard cutout of Ringo Starr onstage. The Lovemongers recorded Led Zeppelin's The Battle of Evermore for the 1992 film Singles, directed by Nancy's husband Cameron Crowe, and played its wrap party alongside a young local band called Mookie Blaylock, soon to be renamed Pearl Jam.[1] [2] [3]

Seattle was exploding with grunge, and the Wilsons were right in the middle of it. In 1991 they took over the old Kaye Smith studio where they had recorded in the seventies and renamed it Bad Animals. Soundgarden made Superunknown there, Pearl Jam recorded Vitalogy, and Nirvana remixed songs for In Utero. Ann sang on Alice in Chains' Sap in 1992, and her house in Seattle became a hangout for the scene's young stars. She later said all those Seattle bands were idealists, and that she and Nancy shared that with them.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heart's own records struggled as grunge took over. Desire Walks On in 1993 reached only number forty eight, though Layne Staley of Alice in Chains sang on its cover of Ring Them Bells, and it was the last album for Howard Leese and Denny Carmassi. Owing Capitol one more record, the band made The Road Home, an unplugged live album produced by Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones. It reached number eighty seven and Capitol dropped them. Ann later said fame put heavy pressure on her in the eighties and early nineties, and revealed long struggles with cocaine and alcohol.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 1995 Nancy asked for a break. She had married Cameron Crowe in July 1986, and now, at forty one, she was going through fertility treatments that could not be scheduled around a tour. She turned to film music, scoring Crowe's Jerry Maguire and later co writing songs for the fictional band Stillwater in Almost Famous, then scoring Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown. After many failed treatments the couple had twin sons, born to a surrogate in January 2000. Ann kept Heart going for a few years with other musicians, and the band was effectively on hold by 1998.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Stairway to Heaven and the Hall of Fame

The sisters brought Heart back on the road in 2002 with a new band that included Alice in Chains bassist Mike Inez and drummer Ben Smith. It became a family tour, with four children and their nannies along for the ride. That January Ann had undergone gastric band surgery after what she called a lifelong battle with her weight. In 2004 came Jupiters Darling, their first studio album in over a decade, with a cover showing the Mandelbrot fractal turned to look like a heart. In 2007 Ann released her first solo album, Hope and Glory, with guests including Elton John and Alison Krauss.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Late in 2009 Ann quit drinking. She wrote that if she had carried on, there was only one way it would end, and that even after watching friends like Andrew Wood, Kurt Cobain and Layne Staley die, she had not understood her own demons. Sobriety lifted what she called a tarp off her creativity. In 2010 Red Velvet Car, a return to their folk and hard rock roots, debuted at number ten, their first top ten album in twenty years and proof they had placed top ten albums in four different decades. The same year, Nancy and Cameron Crowe divorced.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Twenty twelve was a landmark year. In April Nancy married Geoff Bywater, who worked in music for Fox television. In September the sisters published their memoir, Kicking and Dreaming, written with Charles R. Cross, and received the two thousand four hundred eighty first star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. The album Fanatic followed in October. Then, in December, they sang Stairway to Heaven at the Kennedy Center Honors for Led Zeppelin, with Jason Bonham, son of the late John Bonham, on drums, an orchestra and choirs, and President Obama in the audience. Robert Plant was moved to tears.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ann compared singing Stairway for Led Zeppelin to being asked to recreate the Bible for the Pope, and said the nerves only hit her once it was over. Clips of the performance spread fast online, with more than four million views in five days, and a limited single went to number one on the iTunes rock chart. Within days came more news. On the eleventh of December 2012, Heart were announced as members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame class of 2013, after years of being passed over. Ann said she thought people had a fixed idea of what rock was supposed to look like, and Heart did not fit it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

At the ceremony on the eighteenth of April 2013, Heart were inducted by Chris Cornell of Soundgarden, who said the two sisters stood up front like two Joans of Arc and blasted down every sexist barrier in front of them. The original line up of Ann, Nancy, Roger Fisher, Howard Leese, Steve Fossen and Michael Derosier played together for the first time in thirty four years, performing Crazy on You. Roger wrote afterwards of hugging Ann hard and finding genuine affection in the room. Heart's last studio album for a decade, Beautiful Broken, followed in 2016, featuring James Hetfield of Metallica.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rift, reunion and illness

In 2015 Ann married Dean Wetter, a man she had dated briefly in the eighties. On the night of the twenty sixth of August 2016, Heart played a homecoming show at the White River Amphitheatre in Auburn, Washington. Backstage, after Nancy's sixteen year old twin sons left the door of Ann's tour bus open, Wetter attacked them. According to police reports he struck one boy and grabbed both by the throat. He was arrested and later pleaded guilty to two misdemeanor assault charges, receiving probation, counseling and a no contact order instead of jail time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The sisters finished the tour using separate dressing rooms and speaking only through other people. Nancy called those shows excruciating, Ann called them complete hell. Nancy said Wetter never apologized. Ann defended her husband, saying the police should never have been called and that it could have been handled as a family matter. Nancy replied that reporting violence against children is the law. Heart went on hiatus. Ann toured under her own name, and Nancy formed a new band, Roadcase Royale, with the singer Liv Warfield. In May 2017 their friend Chris Cornell died by suicide, and Ann sang his song Black Hole Sun on television in tribute.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In February 2019 the sisters announced they were reuniting for the Love Alive tour, with guests including Sheryl Crow, Brandi Carlile and Joan Jett. Nancy said Heart had been burning out and that Roadcase Royale had been medicine for her soul. The peace did not fully last. By 2022 Nancy was touring a separate version called Nancy Wilson's Heart, with the singer Kimberly Nichole, while Ann released solo work and formed a band called Tripsitter. At the end of 2023 the sisters reunited again, playing a packed New Year's Eve show at Seattle's Climate Pledge Arena backed by Tripsitter.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

In 2024 Heart launched the Royal Flush tour, their first together in five years. Ann said the question was always whether Heart could be Heart without one of them, and it never could. Then in late May she had an operation, and in July she revealed that what was removed had been cancerous. European dates were canceled and the rest of the year postponed while she had preventive chemotherapy, which she finished by September. When the tour resumed in February 2025, she had broken her arm in a fall, so she sang from a wheelchair, at times without her wig. Chappell Roan called that punk.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

Heart kept moving through 2025 and 2026. On the eve of a summer tour two instruments were stolen in Atlantic City, and a local man was arrested. Nancy's guitar was recovered. In May 2026 Dreamboat Annie was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame, and the sisters performed three songs from it at the gala. Ann premiered a documentary about her life, In My Voice, and made a new album with Tripsitter. In the summer of 2026 Nancy said a new Heart album had been recorded in Nashville and was almost finished, with a band documentary and a biopic also in the works, as of 2026.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

The people around Heart

Ann Wilson and Nancy Wilson. The heart of Heart. Ann is the voice and main lyricist, Nancy the guitarist, harmony singer and melody writer, and the two have shared almost every step since childhood. Their bond survived the Fisher breakups, the eighties and Nancy's hiatus, but was badly damaged in 2016 when Ann's husband assaulted Nancy's sons. They reunited in 2019 and again in 2023. Ann now calls it a delicate relationship that works because they finally talk things out like grown ups.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ann Wilson and Mike Fisher. Mike Fisher, Roger's older brother, was a Vietnam draft dodger living in Vancouver when he fell for Ann, and she followed him to Canada. He managed the young band, ran its sound, designed its logo and inspired Magic Man. Ann called theirs a Pygmalion story, saying he was the one person who told her she could do it. They were together nine years until October 1979, when both had been unfaithful and she moved out in a single day.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nancy Wilson and Roger Fisher. Nancy and Roger became a couple soon after she joined in 1974, and his lead guitar and her acoustic playing were central to the early sound. He has admitted cheating on her, and after the split he stayed in the band for a painful year while she dated drummer Michael Derosier. He was voted out in 1979. The two made peace enough to play Crazy on You together at the 2013 Hall of Fame induction.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Nancy Wilson and Cameron Crowe. Nancy met the writer Cameron Crowe in 1981 through a friend and married him in July 1986. She had a cameo in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, recorded music for Say Anything, scored Jerry Maguire, co wrote the Stillwater songs in Almost Famous and scored Vanilla Sky and Elizabethtown. They had twin sons in 2000 and divorced in 2010. In 2012 Nancy married Geoff Bywater.[1] [2] [3]

Ann Wilson and Dean Wetter. Nancy set Ann up on a blind date with Dean Wetter in the eighties, but nothing came of it. They reconnected three decades later during the book tour for the sisters' memoir and married in 2015. In 2016 Wetter assaulted Nancy's teenage sons backstage and pleaded guilty to assault, splitting the family. Ann stood by him, calling him a Zen warrior, and he was still with her in 2024.[1] [2] [3]

Heart and Mushroom Records. The small Vancouver label gave Heart its first break with Dreamboat Annie, then became its enemy. The sleazy Rolling Stone advert, a refusal to raise royalties and the unauthorised release of Magazine led to a court fight that lasted nearly two years. Mushroom's creative director Shelly Siegel died of an aneurysm in January 1979, and the label went out of business in 1980. Capitol later bought the rights to Heart's two Mushroom albums.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ann and Nancy Wilson and Sue Ennis. Sue Ennis met Ann in a high school German class by humming a Beatles tune to see if she would notice. She went on to co write more than two hundred songs with the sisters, including Straight On, Even It Up and Dog and Butterfly, lived with them after the Fisher breakups and played in the Lovemongers. The three used the private nickname Connie, which later turned up in songwriting and production credits.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Heart and Mike Flicker and Howard Leese. Flicker and Leese were teenage bandmates in a Los Angeles group called the Zoo, then moved to Vancouver to work at the studio behind Mushroom Records. Flicker produced Heart's first five albums and won a Juno for Dreamboat Annie. Leese joined as guitarist, keyboardist and arranger and stayed until 1998, making him the longest serving member outside the Wilson sisters.[1] [2] [3]

Heart and Led Zeppelin. Zeppelin was Heart's great model. They were nicknamed Little Led Zeppelin in Vancouver, the Lovemongers covered The Battle of Evermore, and John Paul Jones produced The Road Home. The bond peaked in 2012, when the sisters sang Stairway to Heaven for the surviving members at the Kennedy Center. Robert Plant wept, and Jimmy Page told Nancy she had nailed the guitar part.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Ann Wilson and Chris Cornell. Cornell was a regular at Ann's Seattle house parties in the nineties, once arriving at her Halloween party dressed as his own song Black Hole Sun. He inducted Heart into the Rock Hall in 2013. After his death in 2017 Ann sang Black Hole Sun on television, and in 2018 she performed it with Jerry Cantrell at the Rock Hall ceremony.[1] [2] [3]

Nancy Wilson and Chappell Roan. Chappell Roan began covering Barracuda in 2024 and has said it is a song she wishes she had written, calling Ann the best rock voice of all time. Nancy offered to be her rock and roll auntie, and in September 2025 joined Roan onstage in New York to play the song. Roan also appears in Ann's documentary In My Voice.[1] [2] [3]

Rare facts about Heart

• Heart's name comes from a play on White Hart, borrowed from an Arthur C. Clarke story collection. A friend named a band White Hart after Tales from the White Hart. Roger Fisher's brother got permission to use it, switched the deer for the organ, and White Heart was later shortened to Heart.[1]
• As a teenager Ann won a Seattle newspaper's Beatles essay contest. In 1966 Ann took first prize in a Beatles essay contest and won a camera. Her photo in the paper is how her future writing partner Sue Ennis first noticed her.[1]
• Sue Ennis made friends with Ann by humming a Beatles sitar riff in German class. Sue hummed the sitar line from Love You To near Ann's desk, then drummed on her notebook until Ann looked up. They skipped lunch talking, and a lifelong partnership began.[1]
• Nancy's audition for Heart was learning the acoustic intro to a Yes piece called Clap. Some of the men wanted proof she could play. She learned Steve Howe's tricky acoustic piece, played it with the band at a tavern the next night, and was officially in.[1]
• The sisters' first record credited Ann Wilson and the Daybreaks and left Nancy's name off the songwriting. Their first original, Through Eyes and Glass, was the B side of a country song. Five hundred copies were pressed and half came back unsold.[1] [2]
• Crazy on You was written in an A frame cottage in Point Roberts, Washington, on the Canadian border. The band was based just across the border in Vancouver at the time. By 2019 the song was one of the most played tracks on American classic rock radio.[1]
• Ann estimates she has sung Crazy on You more than sixteen thousand times. She told Classic Rock that the song still satisfies her because there is nothing false in it, and that fans tell her it got them through hard times.[1]
• Heart's Canadian recordings helped radio stations meet Canadian content rules, which boosted early airplay. Because Dreamboat Annie was made in Vancouver, it counted as Canadian content, so stations had a reason to play it, and sales spread region by region.[1]
• Barracuda switches between time signatures, briefly moving into bars of five and seven. Nancy called it a sophisticated song of rage and admitted the young band threw in odd bars partly to show off and make the songs harder to copy.[1] [2]
• When Heart reworked Magazine in 1978, a court ordered guard watched the master tapes. The band spent four days in March 1978 at Sea West Studios in Seattle reworking the album, with a guard present to stop the tapes being erased.[1] [2]
• In the unauthorised Magazine, a synthesizer solo was later replaced by a flute solo. On the approved 1978 version of Just the Wine, the synth solo became flute, and the title track fades about thirty seconds earlier.[1]
• Heart sued Annie Leibovitz over a topless photo, and the negative sits in a box needing two keys. After a Bebe le Strange era Rolling Stone shoot went wrong, a judge ordered the negative locked in a safe deposit box that opens only with keys held by both Ann and Leibovitz.[1]
• The songwriting credit Connie on Never is a pseudonym for Ann, Nancy and Sue Ennis. Connie was the trio's private high school nickname, mocking the straight laced girls they refused to become. It later appeared in Heart credits.[1] [2]
• Private Audition was produced by the sisters under the names Connie and Howie. After the producer Jimmy Iovine told them the material lacked hits, the band produced the 1982 album in house, credited under those nicknames.[1] [2]
• Nancy's raspy vocal on These Dreams came from a cold, and producers later asked if she could get sick again. According to Fred Bronson's book of number one hits, she was ill on the day she sang it. The rough edge worked so well that producers joked about recreating it.[1]
• These Dreams was turned down by Stevie Nicks before Heart took it to number one. Martin Page imagined it as an electric hymn in the style of Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark. Nicks passed, Heart loved it, and it topped the Hot 100 in March 1986.[1] [2]
• Alone was first recorded by its writers under the name i Ten, and also for a sitcom with John Stamos. Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly cut it in 1983, then Valerie Stevenson and John Stamos sang it on the CBS show Dreams in 1984, before Heart made it a number one.[1]
• Grace Slick and Mickey Thomas of Starship sang backing vocals on What About Love. The song was written for the Canadian band Toronto, whose version stayed unreleased until 2002, and became Heart's comeback single in 1985.[1]
• All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You began as a Dobie Gray love song in 1979, with different lyrics. Ann said Mutt Lange's song was originally meant for Don Henley. For years Heart refused to play it live, and Ann later sang it solo with altered words.[1] [2]
• The Lovemongers once performed with a cardboard cutout of Ringo Starr instead of a drummer. Formed for a Red Cross benefit during the Gulf War, the acoustic group had no drummer, so Sue Ennis programmed a beat and they propped Ringo up as a joke.[1]
• Nirvana remixed Heart Shaped Box and All Apologies at the sisters' Bad Animals studio in Seattle. Ann and Nancy owned the studio from 1991 to 1997. Soundgarden's Superunknown and Pearl Jam's Vitalogy were also recorded there.[1]
• Nancy Wilson played a small role credited as Beautiful Girl in Car in Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The film was written by Cameron Crowe, whom she married in 1986. She also had a speaking part in his later film The Wild Life.[1]
• The cover of Jupiters Darling shows the Mandelbrot set turned on its side to look like a heart. The label also released the 2004 album on file sharing networks, a move cited in a brief to the US Supreme Court.[1]
• Ann voiced a role in Adam Sandler's animated film Eight Crazy Nights. The Seattle Times listed it among her side projects, along with an early appearance on The Captain and Tennille show.[1]
• Tom Cruise gave Nancy and Cameron Crowe a personal tour of the Scientology Celebrity Centre. It happened while Crowe was directing Cruise in Vanilla Sky, according to the sisters' 2012 memoir.[1]
• Nancy once gave Eddie Van Halen one of her acoustic guitars because he did not own one. On tour together the Van Halen brothers made a clumsy pass at the sisters, who declined. Eddie later serenaded Nancy over the phone after a night of partying.[1]
• Heart's star was the two thousand four hundred and eighty first on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Rita Wilson spoke at the 2012 ceremony, recalling cruising Mulholland Drive in the seventies in her parents' Barracuda car.[1]
• The guitarist who played the Stairway solo at the Kennedy Center was Shane Fontayne, not a Heart member. A veteran of Bruce Springsteen's band, he admitted he had not realized how iconic the solo was until the comments poured in.[1]
• Ann and Dolly Parton recorded a new version of Magic Man for Dolly's 2023 rock album. Dolly said she had always wanted a reason to sing it, and the pair added new lines to make it their own, thanking Nancy for letting her fill in.[1]
• The bassist on Heart's eighties hits, Mark Andes, had been a founding member of Spirit. Andes also played in Jo Jo Gunne and Firefall and was an early member of Canned Heat before joining Heart in 1982.[1]
• Drummer Denny Carmassi started his career playing topless clubs in San Francisco. He went on to Montrose and Sammy Hagar's band before joining Heart, and later played with Coverdale and Page and Whitesnake.[1]
• Nancy's stolen purple sparkle Telecaster was found after police tracked a buyer's car with plate readers. The instruments disappeared in Atlantic City in 2025. The buyer returned the guitar voluntarily, but a 1966 mandolin was still missing.[1] [2]
• Ann has said Anne Hathaway was interested in playing her in a biopic, but was not quite right. The long planned Heart film is being written by Carrie Brownstein of Sleater Kinney. Nancy has suggested Elle Fanning for herself and Florence Pugh for Ann.[1] [2] [3]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.