Published: May 27, 2025
Heart guitarist Nancy Wilson is featured in a new interview with Guitar World discussing the band’s 1985 reboot, when they made the jump from Epic Records to Capitol with their self-titled album. Following is an excerpt
Guitar World: Heart was your first album for Capitol, and it saw the band undergo a major makeover. Was that part of the conditions on which you signed the deal?
Nancy: “I think we’d reached the end of the average lifespan for most rock bands by that point. We decided that if we wanted to survive, we probably needed to find a new manager and a new record company and have some kind of major reset. We saw the chance to sign with Capitol as an opportunity to reinvent the band. I guess it was almost like the old saying, ‘When in Rome…’ If we wanted to fit in with the whole new MTV era, we had to adapt to survive.”
Guitar World: You had four big hits with songs brought in by outside writers. Was that strange for you as a band who normally wrote their own songs?
Nancy: “They were great songs – timeless, really – and, of course, they brought us huge success, and we’d already fully embraced the notion that we would have to commit wholeheartedly to Capitol’s plan for it to work. We actually spent a couple of days at Ann’s house, with Ron, going through numerous songs to see if there were any we’d be happy to record. ‘Alone’ is a particularly strong song that could have been recorded at any time over the decades. I guess we were a little jealous, though, because we didn’t write them ourselves (laughs).”
