Heart vocalist Ann Wilson says that the Canadian rockers had to accept “devil’s bargains” from the music industry in order to survive the 1980s.
The Vancouver band parted company with their long-time label Epic Records following the release of their 1983 album Passionworks, which peaked at number 39 on the Billboard 200 chart. Passionworks and its predecessor Private Audition (1982) failed to sell more than 500,000 copies in the US, and within much of the music industry, it was believed that the band had long since peaked commercially. But, as Wilson reveals in conversation with Smashing Pumpkins leader Billy Corgan on his The Magnificent Others podcast, the group were picked up by Capitol Records thanks to the support of A&R man Don Grierson, but with conditions attached.
“He said, ‘Well, I really believe in you guys, so come to Capitol and I’ll help you find the right songs,” Wilson recalls. “It was sort of presented like, You can do this or you can just say bye-bye. At that point we were we were using big-time corporate LA management, which is scary enough on its own. But yeah, it was a complete devil’s bargain. The songs that we were presented with, you just kind of had to swallow real hard and and go, Well, there’s something about the song I like, but it hasn’t got any substance. That was the problem I had with most of the songs that we got in the 80s that we did. Even the hits.”
On the band’s first album for Capitol, the self-titled Heart, proven hit songwriters such as Jim Vallance (Run To You, Summer of 69), Holly Knight (Love Is A Battlefield), Martin Page (We Built This City) and Bernie Taupin (Elton John’s songwriting partner) were drafted in to complement the band’s own songwriting. The strategy worked – the Berrnie Taupin / Martin Page co-write These Dreams gave the band their first US number one single, while What About Love, Never and Nothin’ At All all reached the top 10 of the Billboard 100 singles chart.
“the songs that I was writing, we were writing together, were… somewhere else,” Wilson concludes. “They weren’t artificial, they weren’t glossy, all those things that that the ‘8s music was.”
When Corgan asks, If you had to do over again, would you have come at it differently, Wilson replies, “I would have spent more time listening to the radio for instance, and understanding what it was that was turning everyone on so much. Not to copy other records, but to get a feeling about the soul of what’s there.”
Watch the interview in full below:
Wilson recently announced the second album from her collaborative project with her band Tripsitter.
The follow-up to 2023’s Another Door, Consecrated Ground will be released on August 14. The nine-track album is described as “a fearless collection of songs that blends heavy rock, psychedelia, blues, and raw emotional storytelling.”
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