Nancy Wilson Quotes

With ‘Brigade,’ we sort of decided to kind of revamp ourselves and put on the military garb and become more of a fighting unit, you know, like the title of the album, and sort of fight for it.

Sleazy people are always in this business. They run the business, pretty much. There are a lot of barracudas.

We see what music can do for people. Hell, we see what music does for us! When you see thousands of people out in front of you, it’s fixing their lives. It’s helping. It’s healing. It’s bigger than the inconvenience of jealousy or emotional storm clouds.

We’ve come through on a very strange path, and it’s all somehow worked out.

I play a lot of classical music around the house.

One of the signature things about Heart was the acoustic guitar in a rock format, which you didn’t hear that often.

People started to ask me, ‘Do you really play guitar?’ They thought it was a prop. It was just interesting, because of all the imaging stuff.

I don’t think anyone does Rush songs except for Rush.

The electric guitar was a big step for me, but I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to adjust. It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, little lady, come strap on this here big guitar.’ We took it in steps as much as possible.

You need to know how to play live. The ones who can do that are the ones you’ll see around for a long time.

There were not very many girls in rock n’ roll together with men that had a heavy rock sound as well as a more acoustic sound like Heart.

We see people from 6 to 60 years old at the shows.

The Lovemongers came together because we felt kind of overinflated by the end of the Eighties.

The high road and positivity is never the easy way but always the best way.

I saw Led Zeppelin live for the first time when I was thirteen.

We’re not just ‘ladies in rock.’ We’re weird people!

I think it’s important to be kind of brutally honest without making anyone else feel bad in any way, if possible.

Heart is fun for the whole family!

Generally, I think of myself as a guitar player, but when I do find the right song to sing lead on, I try to do my best.

I like playing. Guitar… on a loud rock stage… with colored lights. Everything sounds better with colored lights!

I have done a few solo projects that I really enjoyed and would love to have time to do more. Key word here is time!

One night, I remember being really sick in bed with chills and a fever when Ann came in all excited and said, ‘I have these lyrics! Let me read them to you!’ They were the lyrics to ‘Crazy on You,’ and in my fever haze I said, ‘Yeah! Those are really good!’

We always had a lot of admiration for feminists who were out there trying to change things for the better for women, who were trying to find equality in the workplace and at home.

We came from an era when women normally did not rock.

I was always so jealous of a band like Fleetwood Mac, for instance, where Christine McVie would sing a whole bunch of songs even though Stevie was the obvious lead singer. It added variety to their shows.

My favorite acoustic is the Nancy Wilson Signature Martin.

Heart weren’t part of a movement like grunge; we were our own kind of movement.

I just think it’s good to have a big, living, breathing piece of music that’s not just songs.

I think if there’s a support system in place, and you’re acting adult-to-adult with a sense of unconditional love and forgiveness, only good things will come from any relationship between men and women.

It is nice to be an American and to be able to have an opinion.

When we’re home, we like to cook and be together and do mom things when we can.

My highest score karaoke song is ‘Ben,’ by Michael Jackson.

I think there were a couple really good songs on ‘Whirlygig.’

Ann and I were the main writers in Heart. We had the leadership role, and the guys in the band sometimes had a hard time with that.

As a songwriter, simplicity – what not to do, what not to play – can be the hardest thing to achieve.

There are some beautiful things about people like Katy Perry, who are bold enough to go up on a pink cotton-candy cloud, with a guitar, in a tutu, and sing all by herself.

I’ve always been a little bit in the background as a singer and even as an acoustic-guitar player, although I crank it up and rock with my Marshall stacks, too.

Our mom was a super strident, capable, and strong individual. I think because she was a military wife in the Marine Corps, she had to push back the things that she believed, and she had to really scrape and fight to have her space.

I love singing, and whenever I can sing some more vocal leads, I always covet the chance.

A dream set would include songs by other artists like Paul Simon, Joni Mitchell, and other favorites. More obscure Heart songs like ‘Wait For an Answer’ and ‘Nada One’ would be fun, plus fan favorites like ‘Love Mistake’ and ‘Language of Love.’ Endless possibilities.

As far as havin’ someone to talk to on the road, for instance, who’s not a guy – it’s saved my life many times to have Ann in the same group.

Most of our great influences were male rockers, like Led Zeppelin.

It’s the ultimate compliment to be imitated or at least be somebody’s influence, for sure.

We had the idea as women that we could walk into music and be good at it and be as good as any man and have a career in it without being taken advantage of. So basically, those things came true. The obstacle course was just more difficult than we ever anticipated. We were optimistic and very naive.

We were wild-eyed hippies from the late ’60s. We still had the exuberance of the mind-expanding ’60s – that Tolkienesque, Zeppelin, androgynous, wood nymph, forest fairy kind of innocence. It sounds stupid now, but we felt we were changing the world with music.