Heart's Nancy Wilson Was Brutally Honest About Their Best And Most Underappreciated Songs

Summary

• According to Nancy Wilson, Heart's best song is "Mistral Wind" from the album "Dog & Butterfly".
• "Barracuda" is considered Heart's sexiest song by Nancy Wilson due to its empowering lyrics.
• Nancy Wilson believes "Language of Love" is the most underrated Heart song, wishing it received more attention.

The music of Ann and Nancy Wilson's Heart has been both legendary and somewhat elusive. While the 1970s rock band has been responsible for some of the biggest hits in the industry, they've not been in the limelight as much as some of their contemporaries. This is something the sisters discussed on The Howard Stern Show on April 10th, 2024.

While Heart's epic cover of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven" at the Kennedy Center Honors was loved by band member Robert Plant, the band's actual hit songs are why their fans adore them. During an interview with Vulture, Nancy Wilson, guitarist, songwriter, and second lead vocalist revealed which of their most famous songs are their best work. This article will reveal what Nancy Wilson said about Heart's best and most underrated songs and then reveal which song carries the worst memories.

What Nancy Wilson Said About Heart's Best Songs

During a May 2021 interview with Vulture, Heart's Nancy Wilson revealed which of their songs she considered to be their best.

"There’s a few songs that I think are Heart’s best songs, but if I had to narrow it all the way down to one, I think there’s a special iconography about 'Mistral Wind," Nancy Wilson said to Vulture.

According to SongFacts, "Mistral Wind" came from Heart's fourth album "Dog & Butterfly" and is basically their version of "Stairway To Heaven". The song, much like Led Zeplein's opus, is a lengthy adventure. And this is what Nancy Wilson considers to be her and her sister's band's best work.

"It really paints the whole picture of what Heart’s capable of doing, because there’s storytelling and poetry to it. There’s a sweeping philosophical symbolism to it. It’s also got this dissonance of a guitar intro, which gives way to a big storm that sweeps you through the song and leaves you out the other side of the song as if your life has changed."

Nancy Wilson went on to say that the song achieves "a lot of highfalutin imagery".

"It’s a Ulysses-type song. It describes the journey of waiting for the wind to kick up in your life, and then it does, and then it takes you on more of a wild ride than you ever expected to be on — a life-threatening wild ride."

While "Mistral Wind" is not Heart's most popular song, Nancy Wilson believes it changes people when they listen to it.

"You’ll never look at life the same way again. 'Mistral Wind' represents all cylinders of Heart. We’ve always tried to be heavier and more poetic and life-affirming. Maybe even bird’s-eye-view in certain ways, not just on the ground singing about boyfriend-girlfriend stuff. That’s never been our forte."

Of course, Wilson had to make mention of "Crazy On You", which features the best guitar solo, according to her.

While 'boyfriend-girlfriend' stuff isn't exactly Heart's "forte", they do have an assortment of very sexy songs. When asked by Vulture about which lyrics of their are the"sexiest", Wilson claimed that their 1977 mega-hit, "Barracuda" holds the most colorful.

"'Barracuda' is a scathing attack on the slimeballs, plural. It’s the person who represents that slimeball in the industry, who comes up and tries to fit you into a very small box as a woman with sexuality and objectification — all those slimeball things that they can force-feed you that we weren’t ready to be categorized as. We weren’t going into that box."

What Is The Most Underrated Heart Song, According To Nancy Wilson?

Every major rock band feels as though at least one of their songs was underappreciated. Accoridng to Nancy Wilson's 2021 interview with Vulture, she believes that song to be "Language Of Love".

• "Language Of Love" was released in 1983 as part of the album "Passionworks"

"One [song] that I really loved and wished got more attention was “Language of Love.” It came from an album, 'Passionworks', that I felt was badly produced overall [by Keith Olsen]. But that song had a wonderful, poetic structure to it. It was put on the B-list of Heart songs in the end. Funny enough, I ended up putting a better version of “Language of Love” on our Beautiful Broken album. I redid a couple of songs that I wished would be bigger hits, so at least it got a second life."

Heart's "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" Gives Nancy Wilson Bad Memories

During her 2021 interview with Vulture, Nancy Wilson revealed a few memories tied to Heart's best and boldest songs. She claimed that "Dog & Butterfly" reminds her most of her sister, Ann. This is because she wrote the lyrics and the song represents "her curiosity with all things spiritual". While this song gives her an assortment of good memories, Nancy Wilson admitted that "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" gives her band memories.

The 1990 song was written and produced by Robert Lange, who worked with some of rock music's biggest names.

"All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You'. It was a Robert Lange song, and he had a lot of big hits with Def Leppard and Shania Twain. He’s a huge hitmaker. We were in the position in that part of the ’80s where all of the wrong bands were almost being forced to hire outsider songwriters from the Los Angeles songwriting stable, so they could have bigger hits and make more corporate money," Wilson said to Vulture.

"It was a clumsy time for us as artists and creatives. With that song we were like, 'Okay, if we’re gonna record this song, we have to change it from a country-story type of song and make it a rock song'. It definitely had a catchy chorus and it takes the listeners on a journey, but it wasn’t stuff that we would want to write ourselves."

Wilson went on to admit, "So we changed the gender of the song because it had been written for a man, and we made it our own gender. And what do you know? It became our biggest worldwide hit. It was banned in Ireland. We were like, hey, that’s pretty cool. It almost makes it more of a rock song when that happens. Let’s just say the shoe fit, but not comfortably."