Nancy Wilson

NANCY WILSON – THE ACOUSTIC AND ELECTRIC GUITAR ICON BEHIND HEART – DISCUSSES HER FIRST SOLO ALBUM, COVERING PEARL JAM AND PAUL SIMON, AND – OF COURSE – THAT EVH ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTAL.

As the stalwart acoustic and electric guitar player and co-songwriter in Heart, Nancy Wilson has been a part of our collective sixstring consciousness for more than four decades. And while Wilson has also played with the Heart offshoot The Lovemongers, the R& B-drenched Roadcase Royale and scored a handful of feature films, it took until

2021 for the iconic musician and Rock And Roll Hall Of Famer to finally get around to releasing a solo album.

But that effort, the just-released You And Me, has been well worth the wait. Featuring a mix of Wilson originals, a handful of somewhat left-field covers and a set-closing tribute to Eddie Van Halen, the new effort sees the 67-year-old guitarist still working at a creative high. What’s more, she also recently collaborated with Gibson on her second signature model, the Epiphone Fanatic, and is also, pandemic willing, looking forward to a major Heart tour in 2022.

There’s always been a fair amount of acoustic guitar in your playing, but You And Me leans hard on that instrument, maybe more so than it does electric. Was that something you had in mind from the get-go?

Well, the acoustic has kind of been my main man since I was nine. And I’ve played a lot of electric, too – especially with Heart, where I can, you know, turn the volume to 11 [laughs]. I particularly love playing my blue ’63 Tele that I’ve had for ages.

But the acoustic is kind of where I live. When I joined Heart, I sort of brought the more acoustic element into the band, and then from there

I expanded on to electric. And electric rhythm playing, mainly – not so much lead, necessarily.

If you could make an analogy,

I’d be more of a

Neil Young as an acoustic

guitar player and a Pete Townshend as an electric player.

So it was natural for you to grab an acoustic when it came to writing these songs.

It was. The first song I wrote for the album was the one called “We Meet Again”; I wanted to sort of channel my inner-Paul Simon on that one, as far as the guitar. And also lyrically, actually, in that I was trying to go to that place where you’re taking a long look at the arc of your life, and also kind of professing love to someone in such a deep way where you’re ready to go through sweet and sour and thick and thin with them, all the way through to the river’s end.

In addition to trying to write in the style of Paul Simon, you also cover Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Boxer”. I don’t know if Paul Simon gets the credit he deserves as a monster fingerpicker!

Oh my god, his playing is so genius! And yeah, I really learned my fingerstyle technique from him, the Travis [picking] kind of stuff. And stuff like “Anji”, that’s what I sort of modelled my “Silver Wheels” on, which is the instrumental intro thing that opens “Crazy On You”. I’ve actually modelled a lot of my fingerstyle on Paul Simon.

Another great interpretation on the record is your version of Pearl Jam’s “Daughter”. You really take it in a different direction; where the original is, at least musically, somewhat breezy and light, your take is dark and somewhat ominous.

That one was recorded before my album was even a twinkle in my eye, actually. I did it for a film, a true story about human trafficking called I Am All Girls. I thought some of the words in that song were so appropriate to the subject matter, because there’s that line that says, “She holds the hand that holds her down,” and there’s such anger and rage in that. And so I recorded that with [producer] David Rice at his place in Austin, the Clubhouse, with some incredible players, including Tony Levin on bass. We made a new arrangement that was more sinister and almost psychedelic, with a strange anger attached. Just coming from a female perspective, the anger is a little more charged, maybe.

I have to ask about the Eddie Van Halen tribute, “4 Edward”. Can you talk about your interaction with him?

We were actually on the road with those guys a couple of times; they were just wild men. They were the wildest partiers I’d ever seen. But Eddie actually complimented me on my acoustic playing, and I said, “Oh, coming from you, you know, that’s everything.” And I asked him, “Why don’t you play more acoustic?” And he goes, “Well, you know, I don’t really have one.” I told him, “I’m giving you this one right now!” I think we were backstage and I said, “Give that man a guitar!”

So then at the crack of dawn the next morning, the phone in my hotel room rings, and it’s Eddie. It was obvious he had been up all night and he said, “Listen.” And I listened to him play this gorgeous acoustic instrumental piece that started sort of classical, and had a lot of fiery kind of stuff in the middle, and then kind of finished up with a beautiful major chord thing. So when he left us recently, I thought, “Okay… I’m recording… I should do an instrumental… I should dedicate it to Eddie.”

And I like how it turned out. I basically wrote it in my mind while I was falling asleep, and then when I woke up I lay there and pictured it and listened to it in my head. Then I went back to my phone and I found a little bit that I came up with a long time ago where, once in a while I would add it to the “Silver Wheels” intro for “Crazy On You” when we played it live, just as an extra bit I could toss in there. Then I figured that I could do that with a double drop-D tuning and I could use harmonics at the beginning and harmonics at the end to sort of echo the shape of the piece that he’d written on the guitar that I gave him. And having done some score music in the past, I figured maybe a minute, a minute-and-a-half tops, for reasons of attention span. Just long enough to not get boring.

What are your main acoustic and electric guitars on the new record?

For the acoustics I had my signature model that I cooked up with Martin, and I also used a 1920s “The Gibson” mandolin. And for electric I used my blue ’63 Tele and also the new Fanatic I designed with Gibson and Epiphone. That’s a real screamer – it’s affordable, but kind of a classic-sounding rock guitar. It’s got a good rock personality.

The Fanatic has such a unique body shape, which you also used on your earlier signature model, the Gibson Nighthawk. What about it appeals to you?

It echoes a lot of the cutaway shapes of classic Gibsons, I think, and allows more fretboard to be reachable. And it’s also more like a female shape; to me it’s like a woman’s sideways silhouette. When I drew it, that’s what I was kind of channeling. It’s also a little more diminutive, and it’s not too heavy. It’s a piece of cake, that guitar.