Posts Tagged ‘Ann Wilson’

HEART – ” Little Queen ” Classic Albums Released 14th May 1977

Posted: May 14, 2017 in CLASSIC ALBUMS, MUSIC
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Heart’s second album began to define their sound. The Zeppelin drive is in full force here, on songs like “Barracuda” and “Kick It Out.” But they also prepped for their ’80s pop career by showing a sensitive side on some of the LP’s deeper cuts.  It was released in May 1977 on Portrait Records, and re-released in 2004 with two extra bonus tracks. 1977’s Little Queen was Heart’s second ‘official’ album and features the line-up that had toured their debut classic ‘Dreamboat Annie’. Little Queen is a more adventurous album with a mix of rock and folk that, for the most part, works extremely well. The flute and mandolins play a large part in the overall sound of the album. Nancy Wilson’s acoustic guitar is certainly up in the mix for this remastered version. It’s not the most amazing remastering, after hearing the Fleetwood Mac reissues, but there is still vast improvement. ‘Barracuda’ delivers the sonic attack the music deserves. Roger Fisher still amazes on lead guitar.

“…Beauty Take Us…” they etched into the run-out groove of Portrait JC 34799 – their second album in early May 1977. And Heart’s sophisticated Seattle Rock has been doing just that for decades ever since.

After a blistering debut in the shape of “Dreamboat Annie” on Mushroom Records the year prior (Arista in the UK) – the dynamic songwriting duo of Nancy and Ann Wilson at the core of the band (the caped sisters on the front cover with their band of intrepid gypsies behind them) stumped up yet another radio-friendly tennis-racket wielding winner in “Little Queen” – housing as it does huge fan-faves to this day like “Barracuda” and “Love Alive”. And this superbly remastered Legacy ‘Expanded Edition’ CD even adds on a cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway To Heaven” as one of two bonus tracks – a near ten-minute live version from 1976 that might have its Jimmy Page & Robert Plant originators nodding in tearful appreciation.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of Heart’s second album, Little Queen, which arrived during a legal scuffle with Mushroom Records. Newly signed to Portrait, the band worked at breakneck speed when it was on the road to complete the record and get it out before Mushroom could interfere and halt the recording of the album and possibly jeopardize the future of the new songs that they were working on.
As Wilson points out, it was a prolific time. It helped they were young. “I think you would have had to have been 26 or 27 years old to do that,” she laughs. The album that they emerged with, Little Queen, remains one of their best, and features songs like “Barracuda,” “Kick It Out” and the title track that remain fan favorites.
“We were still figuring out how to write songs, record them and tour at the same time. I think that year, we did something like 250 shows,” she recalls. “Our health suffered, but we were so young that we just kept on doing it. I remember it being a complete immersion in songwriting, recording and touring, all at once. It was a real big thing. It was like when they shoot a rocket off from a planet — the first stage of the rocket has to be the most powerful to get it off through the gravitational pull, and that’s what that year was like for us.”

HEART – ” Live At The Albert Hall “

Posted: January 19, 2017 in MUSIC
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One of the most surprising things about Heart ‘s new live album is that, after more than four decades of being a band, it was their first time playing the historic London Royal Albert Hall. It was a gig that had special significance for several reasons.
“We wanted to go to England and play in Britain, because we haven’t been there for some years,” Ann Wilson explains  “But we wanted to do it in some kind of special way, not just go up and down the country doing the typical shows. When [the opportunity to play Royal Albert Hall came around, it just worked out great, and it was special for everybody.”
Finding the right balance between the band and the orchestra can be a tricky thing. Wilson says it was a combination of carefully rehearsing each song, but also making sure that everything was properly miked to capture both sides, something that they left up to the technical folks who had been brought in. “I think all of the people who were working on that end of it were really professional and they were good and careful,” she says. “It turned out great — it sounds good and it looks good. But it doesn’t look too worked over.
Fans can hear and see the results on Live at the Royal Albert Hall, which was recently released on audio and video.
For the singer, it was quite an experience going onstage at the Royal Albert Hall. “It felt similar to what it feels like to step out onto the Carnegie Hall stage,” she says. “It’s got a certain amount of gravitas to it, for sure. It’s so traditional [and] there’s so much history there, it can be somewhat intimidating. But as it turned out, it was just a real nice rock evening.”
Leading off with “Magic Man” from their 1976 Dreamboat Annie album, it was clear that the guitars were not going to take a backseat to the orchestra at the gig. The added instrumentation elevated the emotional levels of the material in that evening’s set list, breathing fresh air into fan favorites like “What About Love” and fleshing out some of the songs from the band’s latest album, Beautiful Broke.
According to Wilson, the idea to revisit some older songs for the Beautiful Broken album was one that came about during discussions with their record company, which suggested the project. “We sat in their office and discussed it, and it seemed like a fun idea,” she says. Songs like “Johnny Moon,” from 1983’s Passionworks, were given “another chance” at finding an audience that might have missed them at the time they were originally released. The album came along at a time that the band had already been working on new music, as Wilson described in a 2015 interview.
“We’ve been recording live off the stage in soundchecks, because you don’t really have to go into a traditional studio anymore,” she said at that time. “We’re going to take the tracks that we get off the stage and mess with them.”
Beautiful Broken found Heart moving in a different direction than what they had planned. So what about those original recordings? Wilson says that there’s a possibility that they might do something with them at some point. “We still have all of those live tapes and everything sitting around,” she says. “We have all of the files from years of playing live, so that stuff is still available to access.”
For now, she’s just enjoying a short break after another full year of touring. There are no solid plans for a new Heart studio album right now, she says. “At this point, I think we’re just writing. The process is just getting ideas and just writing and then as you go along with that, you start getting bigger ideas on how they could be brought out. We’re rolled back to just having come off the road, a situation that means complete sacrifice from everything. That’s touring — we toured [this past year] and the year before and the year before, so we’re really kind of just calling in new ideas right now.”
There is new music on the horizon from her other musical passion, the Ann Wilson Thing!, who will release their third EP sometime this year. Wilson says three of its five songs are originals. “We’re just taking a break right now from it all,” she says. “We’ll be coming back with fresh things.”

Heart Live At The Royal Albert Hall – released 25th November 2016