“I play it like a percussion instrument”: the guitar solo that Nancy Wilson finds hardest to play
Nancy Wilson, along with her sister Ann, have been the beat that kept Heart going all these years. They are stalwarts of hard rock in their electric vocals and guitar work. Through seismic hits in the 1970s like ‘Magic Man’, ‘Crazy On You’, and ‘Barracuda’, Wilson well and truly made her mark when it came to giving female guitarists their deserved place in the rock music canon—but in many ways, it was far from an easy road.
The strength she had to make it in the depths of a cutthroat industry was often directly channelled into the band’s lyrics, especially in terms of the latter tune from the 1977 album Little Queen. Wilson told Vulture in 2021 that it was among her ballsiest songs.
She said: “‘Barracuda’ is a scathing attack on the slimeballs, plural. It’s the person who represents that slimeball in the industry, who comes up and tries to fit you into a very small box as a woman with sexuality and objectification — all those slimeball things that they can force-feed you that we weren’t ready to be categorised as. We weren’t going into that box.”
That gives you an insight into the tenacity it takes to make it as a woman in the industry, especially half a century ago, but it still doesn’t touch the aspect of what they were really there for – the music. On that front, Wilson knows straight away what her hardest song to play is, and it’s for good reason.
She continued: “‘The Road Home’ is a hard song for me to pull off. It’s a fast and finger-style song; there’s a lot of sliding around to do,” before adding that performing the song makes her fingers hurt as “I don’t play acoustic guitar lightly — I play it like a percussion instrument. All those things combined make that one a real tough one for me. I have to warm up a lot before I tackle it.”
Wilson’s acoustic guitar-playing technique was pertinent, particularly in the 1995 ‘unplugged’ album of the same name as its esteemed song. In the sisters’ eyes, as well as the band at large, this represented a homecoming to their native Seattle, where they traced back to their roots away from the heights of rock and roll rapture and truly stripped things back to where it all began. From a sonic technical perspective, Wilson may find ‘The Road Home’ a difficult tune to master, but it’s clear that its emotionally charged command is also a force to be reckoned with.
Over five decades of playing the game of rock and roll, Nancy Wilson knows a thing or two about everything from blatant industry sexism to tricky guitar riffs – and it’s tough to tell which of the two she finds more of a challenge to face. As a woman treading an often-impenetrable landscape, it’s to her credit that both these aspects have played a critical role in propelling her career. Although music is ultimately the most important thing, it never would hold anywhere near as much power if it weren’t for the voices that power it.
