The “hideous” song Heart swore never to play again: “Everything we wanted to get away from”
After forming in Seattle, Washington, in 1973, Heart would quickly rise to fame with their infectious blend of rock and pop, fuelled by the powerful vocals of Ann Wilson and the infectious guitar-playing ability of her sister Nancy. Whether it be ‘Barracuda’ or ‘What About Love’, the group’s penchant for toeing the line between rock and mainstream sounds proved widely successful, and their oeuvre is brimming with hits.
The band are now considered a pioneer in the industry. A band that formed to bite back against the machismo of rock music and showcase that they could rock just as hard as anyone else. It has made their contirbutions ot the genre and an unstoppably vital part of the history books.
While the Wilson sisters might have many releases they’re proud of, one of their most famous hits, they hate so much that they refuse to play it live. This is 1990’s sexually-charged ‘All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You’, which spent two weeks at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in the US behind Madonna’s ‘Vogue’ and reached number eight on the UK Singles Chart. It was such a force that it was also nominated for the Grammy Award for ‘Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group’.
Notably, the song was composed by the hit songwriter and producer Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange and was released as the lead single from Heart’s tenth album, Brigade. It wasn’t the first interpretation of the composition either; in 1979, soul singer Dobie Grey released a more vanilla rendition with different lyrics. The Heart release tells the story of a woman who seduces a hitchhiker in a hotel to get pregnant because the man in her life is infertile.
However, she leaves before the daybreak, offering the sleeping hitchhiker nothing but a note. This portion of the lyrics read: “He brought the woman out of me / So many times, easily / And in the mornin’ when he woke / All I left him was a note / I told him / I am the flower you are the seed / We walked in the garden / We planted a tree”.
Despite the song’s success, its graphic nature has made Ann Wilson particularly critical of it, so much so that the band no longer perform it live. In the liner notes of 1995’s live album The Road Home, Wilson explained a portion of why she is so opposed to the track. She said, “Actually, we had sworn off it because it kind of stood for everything we wanted to get away from.”
The band had struggled with constant sexualisation of their output, which was, unfortunately, an apparently impossible situation to avoid as two young women in the music industry. No matter how hard they tried, sexuality always played a part in their conversation. Performing songs like this might have its roots in their own sexual liberation, but it still didn’t sit well with the band.
The track was seemingly pushed their way to capitalise on this, “It was a song by ‘Mutt’ Lange, who we liked, and it was originally written for Don Henley, but there was a lot of pressure on us to do the song at the time.”
It was the theme of the woman seducing the hitchhiker to get pregnant that really made Ann change her opinion on ‘All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You’ as the years wore on. “Like, you’re a hitchhiker, I don’t know you, so let’s get in the car and exchange fluids, and now, get out,” she said in a 2015 AXS TV interview with Dan Rather. “I mean, that’s hideous.”
It’s safe to say that Heart hasn’t performed the song live for years. However, in a break from her well-publicised opinion on it, in 2017, Ann Wilson did perform it on her tour, just with several changes made.
Listen to ‘All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You’ below.
