Heart’s Ann Wilson to sing at the Capitol Sunday

Ann and Nancy Wilson, the core of the legacy rock ‘n’ roll band Heart, are sisters. And like all siblings, they squabble. They quibble. They fight.

The Wilson sisters have been in the public eye for five decades; when they squabble, quibble and fight, it’s in public. Heart has been essentially inactive for four years, and both have been vocal about why they haven’t been making music together (different ideas about what they should be writing and recording, and who should constitute the rest of the band).

Guitarist Nancy took to the road with a band of her own, Nancy Wilson’s Heart, while Ann – one of rock’s most powerful female vocalists – has been working on solo projects, and in September of this year released the album Another Door, billed as Ann Wilson & Tripsitter.

Wilson and Tripsitter perform Sunday (Dec. 3) at the Capitol Theatre in Clearwater.

Heart’s initial burst of success, in the mid 1970s, produced “Magic Man,” “Crazy on You,” “Barracuda,” “Straight On” and others that remain staples of classic rock radio. The band had a stringer of softer hits in the 1980s, including “Alone,” “These Dreams” and “What About Love?”

Although there have been numerous personnel changes over the years, the original incarnation of Heart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.

The sisters’ already strained relationship came to a boil in 2016, when Ann’s husband was arrested for assaulting Nancy’s then-16-year-old twin sons during a backstage altercation in Seattle, the Wilsons’ hometown.

Things were amicably settled, Ann said in a 2022 interview with Rock Candy. “If it had happened privately, we’d have got the family in a room and sat down and worked it out between us,” she explained. “Instead, the police were called, and this myth was born that Nancy and I were feuding, and we were at each other’s throats all the time. And it’s really not like that at all.”

The hatchet was apparently buried by 2019, when Heart (including both sisters) went on a national tour; a proposed 2022 jaunt was scrapped, however, when they couldn’t agree on which musicians to hire for the touring band.

Nancy made a surprise appearance with her sister and Tripsitter Oct. 10, 2023 in Santa Rosa, California. And there are three concerts listed for late December on the official Heart website, including a New Year’s Eve date at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena.

In June, Nancy confirmed in a radio interview that she and her sibling were writing together again; “there’s a couple of things that I’m really excited about,” she said. “Very cool. Like stuff that you wouldn’t have heard us do in the ’80s. [It’s] closer to what you would have heard us originally do in the ’70s, late ’70s. So it’s really fun. It’s just exciting and inspiring.

“It’s been a really nice kind of rediscovery of our relationship, working on music together again,” Wilson added. “So, yeah, I’m really happy about that.”

Find tickets for the Dec. 3 Ann Wilson & Tripsitter show here.