Nancy Wilson’s favourite guitarists of all time: “That was the blueprint for our band”
There’s no denying that Nancy Wilson is a blazing beacon for female guitarists everywhere in the rock music canon. At the soul of Heart is an innate sense of sonic ingenuity and fresh perspectives so rarely seen in a landscape awash with the same four boring chords. So many stars are classed as ‘true originals’ these days, but none come with such a truly innovative view as Wilson and the music she has produced over the past half a century.
As much as it sounds contradictory to the above statement, however, sonic originality isn’t just an in-built trait – no matter what any arrogant rock star tries to profess. It takes years of hard graft and fine-tuning to develop the skillset to lift up an instrument and truly make it your own, not least the guitar. In this sense, Wilson too had to learn from somewhere. But in her trademark way, she only took lessons from the very best.
In terms of her favourite guitarists, three stand out above the rest in guiding her towards the lights of rock and roll rapture. The first, naturally, is Jeff Beck, who Wilson described as “a guitarist capable of making music speak with a voice of its own,” providing her with a seminal sense of worship and freedom to chart fertile ground when it came to her own sonic horizons.
Ultimately, Beck’s intricacy and unpredictability is laced in every aspect of the Heart songbook, particularly in tunes like ‘Crazy on You’, where Wilson’s guitar work spins on a dizzying journey through all different moods, techniques, and rhythms. Despite this, proficiency was only one piece of the puzzle, and another top slinger of the six-string then showed her how her music could transcend whole new levels.
Walter Becker was an inimitable presence on the scene as part of Steely Dan, but the band’s smooth blend of the rock realm combined with the swell of jazz and blues inspired Wilson to expand beyond the supposed constraints of genre and explore the true meaning of music that doesn’t have to fit into a consigned box. Channelling this spirit of versatility broke Wilson into a whole new league in terms of the heights she could reach within the industry – simply because she didn’t believe in limiting herself.
A band that also sang off that hymn sheet was Led Zeppelin, and particularly with reference to its guitarist maestro Jimmy Page, Wilson viewed him as a god of the instrument yielding a transformative power which rocketed him – and, in turn, her – to the stratosphere of the rock universe. Speaking previously about the band, she said: “Led Zeppelin were this beautifully mysterious melodic rock band. They would break out all these acoustic guitars and mandolins on songs like ‘Going to California’, and that was the blueprint for our band – we wanted our band to have all these different stylistic ways of playing.”
Ultimately, like everyone else both in the music industry and those who revel outside it, Nancy Wilson has her own collection of heroes who she has worshipped and allowed to guide the artist she has become. But arguably she embodies these spirits in the most creative way as rather than simply amounting to their carbon copies, she takes each essence and then transforms it into her own.
