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Southern Alberta Jubilee Auditorium
Sunday, October 28 - Sunday, October 28
More in: Rock / Pop
Ann Wilson is one of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest female vocalists. This is an inarguable fact — if you don’t believe it, pull out Heart’s 1977 sophomore album Little Queen (or, alternately, turn on any classic rock radio station) and take a closer listen to “Barracuda.” So often described as a feminized version of Robert Plant, Wilson’s performances on this track (as with other early hits like “Crazy On You” and “Magic Man”) is tough, sexy and definitive ’70s rock ’n’ roll. The fact that Wilson sounds just as cool singing power ballads like “Alone” and “What About Love” (in the ’80s nonetheless) is testament to her deserved status as a rock goddess.
But a woman can’t live by pure rock ’n’ roll alone. From the beginning, Heart have always had a softer, even folkier side, and both Ann and her sister — Heart guitarist Nancy — have spent the last couple of decades alternating between Heart and their more organic side-project, The Lovemongers. This fall, for the first time, Wilson decided to go it alone and released her first solo album, Hope & Glory. The album sees the singer again stepping away from the brash rock that made her famous, and this time she uses her big voice to speak out about world events — specifically the ever-contentious issue of war. After considering the rich history of protest songs that preceded her, Wilson decided to only include one original composition on the album and fill the rest of the disc with songs like John Lennon’s “Isolation,” CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” and the mother of ’em all, Bob Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall.”
“It’s a concept album that talks about our social conscience,” Wilson says. “This is a very dangerous and scary time in our history right now. So I wanted to choose songs that were written by other songwriters in other strange and particularly scary times in history. I wrote the one song, ‘Little Problems, Little Lies’ to try to measure up to these other songwriters: Bob Dylan, John Lennon, Neil Young, Lucinda Williams. They’re all people who I consider to be the most relevant songwriters of our era. This is an album that addresses our times. Not just October 2007 — this is an album that talks about World War III and the idea of what our world is going through now.”
Of course, Wilson couldn’t resist sticking a little bit of Led Zeppelin on the record. She chose to record a particularly intense version of the band’s “Immigrant Song.” The ballsy rock anthem isn’t the most obvious choice for a collection of anti-war songs, but sandwiched between The Animals’ “We’ve Got to Get Out of This Place” and The Youngbloods’ “Darkness, Darkness,” it presents itself in a totally new context.
“If you pay attention to the lyrics of something like ‘Immigrant Song,’ it’s a song about invasion,” Wilson says. “It’s really pretty scary, it makes the hair on your neck stand up when you listen closely to it. I think a lot of the time people don’t really pay attention to the words as much and being a singer, that’s my gig, that’s really what I do. My father was a words person and my whole family were word people, and I guess this is really a words album.”
Just because Wilson has carefully chosen her words on this project, it doesn’t mean that she doesn’t still enjoy belting it out with Heart. While they will perform a handful of songs from Hope & Glory at their upcoming Calgary show, the event is being billed as a Heart concert, and it will indeed be Heart playing mostly Heart songs, not a solo Ann Wilson up on that stage. Wilson says that after over 30 years of leading Heart, the band is still what gets her most excited. And yes, she still loves singing “Barracuda.”
“Heart is where I live. Heart is my family, and that’s the thing that I’ve been doing all these years, and I wouldn’t still be doing it if it didn’t mean everything to me,” she says.
“We also feel that it’s legitimate. We’re not just trying to get the paycheque off of our old glories. We appreciate being able to support our children, but the main thing is for the people who are in Heart, especially me and Nancy who have been doing it for all this time, we’re really feeling authentically thrilled by it, because things are new all the time. This is what we do.”
