“I have to warm up”: the one guitar solo Nancy Wilson struggles to play
No artist is safe from those few songs that defeat them. Even though Ann and Nancy Wilson have had some of the more unconventional hits to come out of the 1970s with Heart, they were never destined to be prog-rock legends whenever they hit the stage. What they did had to be a little more organic than the flashy rock and roll around them, but even Nancy knew that some tracks were a bit harder than others whenever she picked up her guitar.
But that didn’t mean there weren’t a handful of surprises laced throughout the band’s music. Even though the sisters would become known for some of the most extravagant videos of the 1980s and the kind of power ballads that would make most hair metal bands envious, they had their fair share of switch-ups that may have left people like Rick Wakeman or Keith Emerson looking on with approval.
Take the song ‘Barracuda’, for example. The whole track is far from the most adventurous tune in the world harmonically, but its sense of rhythm is more than a little bit strange. Going through the entire song, there are a handful of moments where they throw an extra beat into the mix to throw people off, and when they hit the final riff to close out the song, they end the whole thing with an odd number of times, which gives off the feeling that the record suddenly started skipping.
Let’s not forget the massive people behind them during those early years, either. Roger Fisher may not get the same accolades that many of his guitar-toting peers do, but listening to the kind of harmonics that he gets out of his guitar, he at least deserves a cursory mention next to people like Alex Lifeson of Rush for making strange sounds come out of his instrument beyond the typical solo runs.
“It’s a fast and finger-style song; there’s a lot of sliding around to do.”
Nancy Wilson
Being adventurous like this wasn’t out of the ordinary for them, though. One of the band’s biggest influences was Led Zeppelin, so this was no different than what they had seen Jimmy Page doing when the band entered their excessive phase on albums like Houses of the Holy or Physical Graffiti. But the other feature of Zeppelin was acoustic playing, and Nancy remembered getting tripped up when playing the tune ‘The Road Home’.
Although Nancy had plenty of experience playing rock and roll guitar, she felt that she could never quite work her way around certain parts of this track, saying, “‘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. 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.”
And coming from Nancy isn’t something that should be taken lightly. Some of her live renditions of ‘Crazy on You’ feature some of the greatest fingerpicking any rock star has ever played before she goes into the opening chords, so hearing her beat the hell out of a guitar like this is as much a workout for the fingers as it is a beautiful guitar passage.
Some people like taking the easy way out when playing guitar and go right to electric, but one of the other reasons why ‘The Road Home’ is so hard comes down to the age-old truth behind guitar playing. Most people can try their best once they plug into an amplifier, but the test of any great musician is giving them an acoustic and seeing what they sound like without any pedals to hide behind.
