Heart’s Nancy Wilson says The Beatles “drove us to our calling” as children.
The 71-year-old rocker insists she and her sister and bandmate Ann Wilson, 75, never intended to “break a glass ceiling” when they entered the music business.
The Wilson sisters co-founded Heart in the early 1970s, with the band officially forming in 1973 and releasing their debut album Dreamboat Annie in 1975. Blending hard rock, folk, and powerful vocals, Heart quickly rose to prominence, becoming one of the first female-led rock bands to achieve major commercial success. Over the decades, they’ve sold over 35 million records worldwide and earned a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013.
Asked about their influence on other women in the male-dominated industry, Nancy told WJFF Radio Catskill: “It’s so interesting because that question has been more and more frequent as we’ve gone along because there’s been more and more change and more successful women out there in the business world, in the corporate world, in all levels of the workforce, including entertainment and music.”
Nancy quipped that they went at it like “military brats” and “took no prisoners,” while revealing that The Beatles were their biggest inspiration growing up.
She continued: “We never walked into this thinking, like, ‘We wanna break a glass ceiling.’
“We were just driven — because The Beatles came out when we were little kids, and The Beatles just drove us to our calling. It was just like we were aimed like a pistol from the minute… We already had music in our family — lots of singing and playing piano and harmony singing and ukuleles and aunts and uncles and grandparents — so we had all the gifts given to us in a musical family just to go straight into music with, and the calling was loud and clear. But the fact that we were women didn’t even register in our minds at the beginning. We were just little kids, so we had no sexual identity to conform to at the beginning. So we just went ahead, like the military brats that we are — we just joined forces and took no prisoners. [Laughs].”