“Very Zeppelin”: The songs that saw Nancy Wilson try to mimic her heroes
When you think about the amount of bands they inspired, Heart may well have reasonable grounds to consider themselves as one of the most influential rock acts ever. A rock group fronted by two sisters might not sound like anything revolutionary in today’s world, despite there not having been a complete demolition of the gender imbalance, but when they emerged in the 1970s, there were few other acts offering what they did on the same level as the Seattle group.
In terms of what they offered musically, their style might not have been unique as they continued to add to the rock canon by expanding on ideas that their predecessors had laid out for them. They weren’t ripping off other bands, but tastefully taking the best elements of the foundations that they had created and manipulating them in ways that promoted their strengths as a group.
The Wilson sisters, Ann and Nancy, were massively influenced by the hard rock groups that had emerged at the tail end of the 1960s such as Led Zeppelin, but also knew how to balance that heaviness with a love of folk and occasional forays into pop music. It’s easy to lump Heart into the former category, but the truth is that they were an incredibly diverse bunch that were passionate about drawing from a variety of sources in order to keep their sound feeling fresh.
However, this Zeppelin influence was something that they actively acknowledged, and in an interview with Vulture in 2021, Nancy Wilson went on to discuss the three songs that were largely inspired by their idols, referring specifically to the guitar work that she had laid down for them.
The first track which immediately sprung to mind for Wilson was ‘Mistral Wind’, a track taken from their fourth album Dog & Butterfly in 1978. While the song is largely acoustic in the early part, it explodes into a Jimmy Page-esque riff a couple of minutes into the track, as Ann launches into some extravagant Robert Plant-inspired vocal roars. Speaking of how the guitar was specifically inspired by Led Zep, Nancy claimed that “that’s got the dissonance and unexpected structure between the keys of E and F.” She continued: “You sort of break the rules like Jimmy Page often did with his playing of his parts. You’re like, ‘whoa, that’s out of left field.’”
She would then go on to reference a song that the band performed live for their performance at the Royal Albert Hall alongside the Royal Philarmonic Orchestra entitled ‘Heaven’. While it would eventually surface on the band’s 2016 album, Beautiful Broken, she specifically singled out this rendition due to its resemblance to a certain Zeppelin track. “It has me seated on a mushroom with a cello bow,” Nancy explained, “open tuning to a song that’s almost like a ‘Kashmir’. That’s something Jimmy would do, and that was out of the box.”
Wrapping up, she referenced an acoustic number called ‘The Road Home’, taken from the album of the same name that they worked alongside Led Zep bassist John Paul Jones. Referencing the title track, she said that there was an “acoustic bit that runs through the song, which struck me as very Zeppelin.” You can’t underestimate the influence that Led Zeppelin had over Heart, but they sure knew how to put that influence into practice with the greatest effect.
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