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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0OX_8YvFxA
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.”
The Fat Angel Sings 