“Such an influence”: the genre that saved Heart’s career
Rock stars often talk about their moment of taking flight, arriving when they leave their hometown. The ironic thing was, for Heart, it happened when they came back to their roots.
As much as the band loved their adopted sonic home of Seattle, its music scene in the early 1970s left more to be desired, and, as such, they quickly left and went on to find their footing in Vancouver, where they recorded their debut album Dreamboat Annie and started feeling their first glimmers of success.
The years that followed would only continue to take Heart further and further away from where they started, putting the foot to the floor in terms of the number of cities they could visit on tour and the legions of fans they could garner. Famously, this didn’t come without tensions and bumps in the road, between breaking record contracts and firing band members.
All of this meant that after the best part of a whirlwind decade, and a musical tide that had swept quickly from one hard rock landscape in the 1970s to the surf of new wave in the ‘80s, the band were left feeling a little bit defeated by an industry which certainly had not always presented an easy ride to them. It was time to regroup, and they needed to head back home.
As much as this could have been chalked up as a fall from grace, it actually ended up being the essential energy boost that Heart always needed, as, when they returned, they realised they were being greeted with not only a hero’s welcome, but a very different Seattle scene to the one they had left behind.
Nancy Wilson previously described the band’s decline at the end of the ‘80s, which rendered them “uncool”, but they were being brought back into the fold of an electric safe haven in the form of the grunge community. “I can’t tell you how relieved we were to find that out after the eighties and we came back to Seattle, because guys like [Alice In Chains guitarist] Jerry Cantrell were there going: ‘Oh my god, you’re such an influence’,” Ann Wilson added.
She continued: “I still well up when I remember him asking me how the beginning of ‘Mistral Wind’ went. We were playing guitars at Ann’s house and just trying to find our community again in Seattle, and there it was, larger than we ever expected it to be.” It must have been intimidating and humbling to feel like you had to start from square one, but there the grunge rockers were, ready and waiting.
That scene, filled with its blistering guitars and moody atmosphere, might have seemed like a pretty impenetrable place to get a foothold in when you came from an entirely different path. It was also, pertinently, a male-dominated field, but none of that mattered when it came to the homecoming of some of your city’s greats. Heart were up there with the best of them.
As such, grunge became the unsuspecting hero of the band’s career, giving them a new lease of life with the realisation that they had a whole new slew of exciting voices behind them, who also had their backs. It was a fresh start, it was a new muse, but more importantly than all of that combined, it was Seattle, and it was home.
