As Heart prepare to embark on their first tour in 5 years, Ann Wilson says the band hope to write new music

Five years after her last concert tour, what Nancy Wilson calls “the real Heart,” with herself and her older sister, Ann Wilson, is hitting the road — and she wants to make some new music, her first Heart since Beautiful Broken album in 2016.

“What we're really hoping to achieve is to maybe write more stuff together,” says Ann Advertising sign. He adds, however, “We have no plans for that right now. We don't really plan too far into the future. we don't count like that. We're just going to do this tour and see what happens. But I think if a song comes out of a situation, it will be really good, because it will be authentic. It's about me and Nancy making it.”

There is, however, one new song Heart is working on – “Roll the Dice,” written with longtime collaborator and Lovemongers bandmate Sue Ennis with the goal of including it on the Royal Flush tour shows that begin April 20 in Greenville, SC Ann. says it's still “a work in progress,” which Nancy started when she and Ennis met “just for songwriting purposes. A lot of times we text each other and we have concept ideas and title ideas and lyric ideas. When he finally came to visit me at my house in northern California, we spent about a week together and actually recorded some demos.”

There are no plans for “Roll the Dice” other than to play it in concert, but Nancy says she's also trolling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's band vaults, listening to unreleased material with the thought of releasing some of it on the near future as well. “There are some unfinished things I'd like to finish with Anne and Sue,” he says. “There's a really cool song called 'Sweet Deceiver,' but the words were never quite right, so we never recorded it properly. I think I might want to finish this song. I've been trying to think of new chorus lines ever since I heard the demo. I would love to write new things too.

“If we get a song or two coming out of Heart that would be really great. These days, it's kind of one song at a time, but you can still do a whole album, which is great. I love the albums,” he adds. “When I can put an album in its entirety, in the order it was intended, that's the best for me. The new Kacey Musgraves [Deeper Well] it's really great. I love the Post Malone album, Austin. Taylor Swift's stuff is amazing. So we'll see.”

In the meantime, the Wilsons are happy to have Heart back on tour, with a lineup of mostly new members. only guitarist Ryan Waters was part of the group's last tour in 2019, while he and his Tripsitter bandmates—guitarist Ryan Wariner, guitarist-keyboardist Paul Moak, bassist Tony Lucido and drummer Sean T. Lane— they worked with Ann during the interim. The sisters plan a no-covers setlist this time around, focusing on what Nancy says are “songs that mean a lot to a lot of people, they're the Heart songs they know and love and they're also the soundtracks to people's lives.”

“What I really like about Heart and miss about Heart is the flexibility, musically, within the band itself,” he notes. “If we wanted to, we could be a Led Zeppelin cover band. Or if we wanted to, we could be a total comedy routine band. We could do all kinds of amazing covers, but this time, it's going to be all of us.”

Ann adds, “We really try to keep it clean. The whole idea is to do something we've never done before… just a whole set of Heart music from different eras of the band.”

That plunge, meanwhile, led to some unexpected perspective on Heart's nearly 50-year recording career.

“I think I've always been so busy performing the songs and trying to be great on stage that I've never really sunk into the true meaning of some of the songs until now,” explains Ann. “The other day in rehearsal they were working on 'Dog and Butterfly' and I sat down and it was so beautiful and the feeling was so wonderful and beautiful and tender, and I teared up immediately, even before I sang anything. It was awesome.”

The sisters acknowledge that there are still some differences in their individual views of what Heart is and should be, but they've found enough common ground for the band to tour the rest of 2024 in North America and Europe — with opening acts such as Cheap Trick, Jason Bonham's Led Zeppelin Evening and Randy Bachman's BTO, as well as three stadium dates this summer supporting Def Leppard and Journey.

“We were talking. We're good together. We just felt it, why not?” says Anna. “The common ground is that we both want it to be great and we both absolutely want it to be Heart. We basically put it together and said, 'Let's go!'” Nancy — who played her Nancy Wilson's Heart in 2022 and 2023 — adding that “there are so many things, occasionally, from 2019… a lot of it is just family drama and inevitable, and just other things that people wanted to do besides Heart. So we did them our own stuff for a while, and there was also this little interruption called the pandemic.

“And, you know, I just turned the big 7-0 [on March 16]so it's like, “Wow… If I ever want to get a chance to do this amazingly fun thing again, now is the time.”

That said, Nancy, for one, wouldn't mind if the Heart reboot takes even longer than currently planned.

“I think that will at least get us through the year, if not beyond. My fingers are crossed,” he says. “There's no telling if it's going to run like a well-oiled machine, but I think once we get going it's going to be smooth and steady and rock like the well-oiled machine it knows how to be, and that's the fun part. The shows can be so exciting and so transcendent and the electricity is incredible. So that's why we're here.

“We've built this train,” he adds. “We've got the wheels and we're putting it on the track and we'll see how fast it can go — and how far it can go.”