Posts Tagged ‘Nancy Wilson’

STILLWATER – ” Stillwater Demo’s ” ( Nancy Wilson and Peter Frampton) Record Store Day 2021

Posted: May 30, 2021 in MUSIC
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A collection of the 6 demos recorded by Nancy Wilson and Peter Frampton for the songs they wrote for the fictional band in the iconic rock film “Almost Famous”. RSD will be the exclusive vinyl edition, the tracks will appear on a future project but available only on CD and Digital.

In the movie “Almost Famous” (2000), the band Stillwater was supposedly an amalgamation of Poco, The Eagles, Led Zeppelin and a few other bands that Cameron Crowe had actually written articles about early in his career with Rolling Stone.

One of them leapt off a hotel balcony into a swimming pool. Another almost missed a ride on the tour bus after making a detour to an after-show bash. They met groupies and partook in their share of on-the-road partying, and a newspaper headline declared that the band “runs deep.

If you think that sounds like Stillwater, the fictional band from Almost Famous, you’d be correct. But those tales also apply to a real-life group of the same name that existed during the same period,

The 1973 moustached collective featured in writer/ director Cameron Crowe’s ”Almost Famous” has a legitimate rock pedigree. Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready is the real talent behind Russell Hammond, the band’s charismatic lead guitarist (played by Billy Crudup), while ex Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson (Crowe’s wife) plays rhythm guitar for the group. What’s more, ’70s vet Peter Frampton penned several of the Stillwater tunes heard in the movie, and Wilson and Crowe cowrote the band’s bass driven anthem ”Feverdog,” which made the film’s soundtrack.

Wilson, who also scored the film, says she recruited talent with classic rock roots (Frampton) and contemporary know-how (McCready), because she knew she wouldn’t create a believable sound otherwise. The goal was to make a band ”that’s really good, but not all the way formed yet,” she tells EW.com. ”An ‘opening for Black Sabbath’ kind of sound.” And she also wanted to complement the movie’s satirical if loving take on rock & roll Über egos. ”We had to walk the line between parody and something that sounds legit,” says Wilson. 

Record Store Day 2021 release from UMC

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.

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.”

ROADCASE ROYALE – ” Get Loud ” feat Nancy Wilson

Posted: March 8, 2017 in MUSIC
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Image may contain: 2 people, hat and close-up

Nancy Wilson from Heart and former Prince vocalist Liv Warfield debuted “Get Loud,” the first single from their new project, Roadcase Royale. In their new video, the band builds a funky, nimble groove, led by Warfield’s soulful belting and the acoustic/electric guitar attack of Wilson and Prince protégé Ryan Waters.

In addition to Wilson, Roadcase Royale features three current Heart members: keyboardist Chris Joyner, bassist Dan Rothschild and drummer Ben Smith. While the band announced studio sessions for five original songs, they have yet to announce an album title or release date for the material.

Veteran rock photographer Neal Preston shot the video. “Neal is among the top five all-time rock photographers and he is also my dear friend,” Wilson says . “I’ve literally known since I was a perm-haired girl in the early 1980s.”

Asked about her shift towards a more soulful type song than Heart fans will be used, Wilson has said  that “It totally was natural for me. That’s mainly Chris Joiner’s track that I really fell in love with. That acoustic guitar part was just right down my alley.” Upon unveiling Roadcase Royale, Wilson assured her Heart fans that this new “side project” is “not a replacement” for the long-running classic rock band

The sextet made their live debut January 20th following the Concert for America: Stand Up, Sing Out! event. Their next show is March 25th at the Los Angeles Theatre as part of the fifth annual Rock Against MS Benefit Concert and Award Show.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DL7Yl_On_lo

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

HEART – Anne Wilson Rocks Great Frontmen

Posted: April 5, 2015 in MUSIC
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Ann Wilson fronted the Seattle band Heart and proved that girls can rock as hard as the boys. After recording their debut, “Dreamboat Annie”, “In the actual moment of recording our first album [‪#‎DreamboatAnnie‬], I don’t think we had any clue that it was going to still be played in 2015… on the radio, in people’s homes, that it would still be with people’s lives.” they would continue to enjoy success for thirty years and counting. With sister Nancy on guitar, the band would release three more critical and commercially successful albums in the 1970s. Nancy created some of the most infectious riffs ever such as “Crazy on You,” “Barracuda,” and “Magic Man.” However, it was Ann’s incredible voice that was the cornerstone to the band’s success as they helped define music in the ’70s. Heavily influenced by Led Zeppelin, they would often pay tribute to the legendary band with live covers of “Rock and Roll,” “Stairway to Heaven,” and “Battle of Evermore.” During the ’80s, they adopted a more pop rock groove and had such hits as “These Dreams,” “What About Love” and “If Looks Could Kill.” The band was relatively quiet during the ’90s, but came back in the 21st century with a vengeance. To date, Ann and company have released three records as Heart since 2001. While Ann Wilson is a little older, her voice remains one of the most powerful in music today. In 2013 Heart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Ann and Nancy Wilson’s guitar tech, Jeff Ousley, lead guitarist Craig Bartock, and bassist Dan Rothchild before Heart’s show at the U.S. Cellular Center in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on March 21, 2015. Ousley—who’s been maintaining the Wilson sisters’ gear (and making them mean cups of coffee) for more than 20 years—walked us through everything from Ann’s custom Martin acoustics to Nancy’s vintage SG and Tele, while Bartock and Rothchild shared their cool customized instruments.

Nancy Tele

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEGpjvkiS4k