Heart Were Surprised to Be ‘Singled Out as Women’

Heart helped to break important ground for the wave of female artists and bands who followed in the wake of their success. But at the core of the Seattle-bred group’s beginnings, it was all about the music.

“When we started out, [it] was not a gender-specific story,” Nancy Wilson shares in the latest episode of the UCR Podcast, which you can listen to below. “The interesting thing about how Heart started was that we were in democracies with guys in bands, you know. So we were never, you know, female-specific about anything. We just were just one of the guys, in many ways, just slogging away side by side with some great players.”

As the band began to build a name, tensions would develop between the Wilson sisters and the other members, but their perceived dominance happened organically, she says now. “We grew up in a super-musical family, with all levels of music and styles,” she explains. “We [had[ the advantage as two girls and sisters in the Heart context, to be the songwriters. Then, after that, we got the attention, being at the center focus of it all.”

READ MORE: Top 10 Heart Songs

All of this created an interesting dynamic, “being singled out as women,” she adds. “We weren’t feminists, we were just strong military brats with a really big work ethic that wanted to be like the Beatles….and by the time we came out in the mid-’70s, everything was possible in music. There was Janis Joplin and Grace Slick and then here comes Fleetwood Mac. Heart was just a natural progression in the family of music at the time.”

Listen to Nancy Wilson on the ‘UCR Podcast’

Flashing forward, Wilson will share the things that she’s learned at the third annual Women’s Rock Camp, happening Dec. 5 through Dec. 8 in Los Angeles. She sees that there’s been a lot of progress in the time since she first began making music. “It’s an interesting time right now in music,” the songwriter admits. “Because, you know, it’s not so wildly crazy to see women out there doing it — you’ve got boygenius now and [so many] cool [artists like] Courtney Barnett and also, the Last Dinner Party opening up for the [Rolling] Stones and stuff like that. It’s not so such a rarefied, unusual thing anymore for women to step forward and be counted as rockers and and a force in music.”

Heart will resume its Royal Flush tour starting in February with a rotating cast of special guests including Cheap Trick, Squeeze and Lucinda Williams.