Back on the road, Nancy Wilson of Heart still kicking at 70

Nancy Wilson, at age 70, can still perform her signature kick move while sporting her guitar.

“I can do that and more!” she told The Atlanta JournalConstitution on a Zoom call from her home in Sonoma, California, on the eve of the 2024 Heart tour. “I can’t not dance and move.”

The tour, which will run throughout the year, started April 20 in Greenville, South Carolina, and stops at Kansas City’s T-Mobile Center on Oct. 4. It’s the first time the band has hit the road since 2019.

“I’m happy for us to be together again,” she said.

“It’s been a little too long for us to get back out there.”

Wilson said a combination of the pandemic and behindthe scenes management changes delayed Heart’s return. For the first time, the sisters have different managers, resulting in what she called “power grabbing” disputes.

“There were extra moving parts to sort out what was highly unnecessary drama,” she said. “We finally sorted it out and now we’re here.”

The band spent more than a week in rehearsals before the tour began.

“There are a lot of things about Heart songs that are not simple,” Wilson said. “There are intricacies in these songs to get right.”

At the same time, perfection is not the goal: “It will be fun regardless of the mistakes that we make. In my view, it’s definitely a human show.”

Heart uses no prerecorded music. Every note is live.

“Last New Year’s Eve, we had only done our third show with this lineup. We had to start a song over,” she said. “We forgot to transpose the keyboard. People were surprisingly appreciative of the mistake we made. Sometimes, the imperfections are the perfection of it.”

The bottom line is she still gets plenty of joy being on stage performing rock classics like “Magic Man,” “Barracuda” and “Crazy on You,” along with “These Dreams,” in which she sings lead.

The rituals before the concert, though, are far different than they were in the cocaineaddled 1980s. Now it’s a diffuser with calming scents, homeopathicarnica pellets to reduce swelling, vitamin C pills and a yoga room backstage.

“We used to be made out of rubber in our 30s,” she said. “We now have a wellness space for massage and strengthening.”

Over the decades, both sisters have worked in other