Nancy Wilson calls it a fluke, chance, pure happenstance. She swears she never intended to release a live acoustic album, but then the employees at McCabe's Guitar Shop twisted her arm just enough, and then remembered to push "record" on the DAT recorder -- just in case.
"This was supposed to be something I threw into the archives for family and friends," Wilson says of her first-ever solo disc, Live at McCabe's Guitar Shop, due out on Feb. 2. "This is totally under the radar."
An audience of roughly seventy-five locals, admiring musicians and personal friends witnessed the grassroots recording of Wilson's solo debut at a neighborhood guitar store in Santa Monica, Calif., nearly two years ago. Armed with just her guitar and mandolin, Wilson candidly and passionately performed a slew of her own songs alongside Heart classics and covers of songs by Paul Simon, Peter Gabriel and Joni Mitchell.
"I used to do gigs like that a lot in college ... but I prepared a long time for the McCabe's show because it was such an intense and personal performance," says Wilson, who began her career with the power-chord pop group Heart at age twenty. "It's the most naked I've ever felt, but I don't mind that."
After her gut-wrenching solo show, Wilson whittled down more than two hours of music into a succinct fifty-two-minute album, and then found herself shaking hands with an unlikely partner: Epic Records. Heart left Epic following the release of their commercially disappointing 1983 release, Passionworks. The Wilson sisters then promptly recorded their best-selling album ever for Capitol Records -- 1985's Heart, which sold five million copies and spawned the hit singles "Nothin' at All" and "These Dreams." The modern-day reconciliation with Epic was arranged by Wilson's good friend and manager, Kelly Curtis, who also works with one of the label's star artists: Pearl Jam.
"I'm thankful that Epic took an interest in this project," she says. "I wanted to make the album short and sweet because people will be interested in a guitar and voice for only so long -- it's both superhuman and fallible."
The proudest moments on Live at McCabe's come when Wilson cracks open her own songwriting notebook. The album's most artistic endeavor, "The Rain Song," was born out of Wilson's rose-colored childhood imagination back in 1966, when Paul Simon was god and poetry always rhymed. "That was the first song I ever wrote ... it was my own little 'Cassie's Song,'" she says.
Elsewhere on Live at McCabe's, the Led Zeppelin-influenced "Half Moon" begins with a haunting mandolin solo and then rumbles into the gut-wrenching story of a close friend clinging to a failed marriage. "Everything," on the other hand, reads like Wilson's own confessional chat with herself, which came gushing and bubbling from her inner recesses during an intense songwriting session in southwest Washington state.
"The ocean is the primordial cradle ... I went there, just me and my three dogs, and wrote my butt off," she says. "By the end of thirteen days I was totally sick of myself."
Incidentally, Wilson will escape her solitude this summer when she teams up with her sister and musical sounding board, Ann, for a dynamic duo tour. After twenty-five years together in Heart and another six in the Heart offshoot Lovemongers, Ann and Nancy are taking to the road by themselves for the first time ever. Nancy says they will team up for a dose of songwriting before touring the nation's theaters with a set list of old favorites, cover tunes and fresh-off-the-presses songs for 1999.
And, yes, the Wilson sisters will bring along a DAT recorder -- just in case.
ANNI LAYNE
(January 26, 1999)
