While promoters offered big bucks for Heart to reunite for their first tour since 2019, Ann Wilson tells Rolling Stone the decision to do so came down to her and sister Nancy being “tired of not playing together, and we both wanted to do a Heart tour.
“So then there is this question hanging in the air: Can Heart be Heart without Ann or can Heart be Heart without Nancy? It never could.
“We just went, ‘Well, let’s do what we have to do.’ Our discomforts of the past, at least from my perspective, have really been ironed out.”
What was ironed out was the riff caused between them by Ann’s husband, Dean Wetter, who assaulted Nancy’s twin teenage sons backstage in 2016.
Looking back, Ann says she wishes she’d “have gotten us all together in a room that night after the event, and tried to talk it out as a family, rather than the police being called and Dean being hauled off to jail. When he sees kids jumping around, acting like fools and letting dogs out into an active highway, he spanks them. That’s just the way he is.”
And Nancy adds that she did what was best for sons.
“Had I tried to dodge it, I could have lost my custody of my kids. I could not have done that, legally. The venue reported it, so it was on record. I had to follow the letter of the law in the circumstance. Because I could have gotten in big trouble if I did not. It was diminished to a misdemeanor — that’s all I could do.”
Ann’s not entirely convinced, saying, “That’s up for interpretation.” But, she adds that the “one little dark spot that seems to be fading, and I’m really glad about it.”
As is Nancy, who says, “We’ve always been soulmates. I’ve always loved her, understood her, sometimes maybe more than she understands herself. But at the same time, she knows me like nobody else. It’s that thing when you’re on a stage with your sister in a big rock show.”
The one thing they completely agree on is that they will not perform their biggest hit, 1990’s “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You,” which is about “a woman who picks up a hitchhiker in the rain, only to sleep with him and have his child out of wedlock.”
Ann says the song grosses her out, with Nancy saying “It just never felt like a rock song.”
Heart, with Cheap Trick opening, are in Columbus, Ohio tonight. {Wednesday)
REUTERS PHOTO
