Nancy Wilson talks Taylor Swift, Led Zeppelin before Heart concert in Tampa

After five years, Heart is coming back to Tampa. As always, the rock ‘n’ roll pioneers are doing it on their own terms.

The Royal Flush Tour, which rolls into Amalie Arena on Friday, marks the band’s second tour since sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson reunited following a three-year hiatus. Guitarist and singer Nancy Wilson is delighted to be playing a new song, “Roll the Dice,” and traveling with her older sister.

“It was important to do our separate projects, and then of course, the pause of the shutdown caused a lot of time to go by as well,” said Wilson, 70, in a Zoom interview with the Tampa Bay Times. “But it’s really fun and rewarding and fulfilling to be with my sister again doing what we know how to do best.”

Wilson also spoke about her influences, legacy and thoughts on the future of women in music. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I watched the recent clip from the Howard Stern show where Robin Quivers talked about how much Heart meant to her. You mentioned the new generation of artists, like boygenius and Taylor Swift, who are empowering women —

Nancy Wilson: And Billie Eilish. Olivia Rodrigo. Maggie Rogers. I mean, there’s just some really cool women coming up. Nowadays, they’re writing their own songs, they’re playing instruments and singing for real on microphones and not just, you know, basically karaoke at their shows. I kind of feel like, “What took you so long!” Little by little, the glass ceiling that I guess we broke just opened up better channels for more women to have the bravery to step out.

I love those new female artists. I love to listen to a lot of these albums that they’re making, and I’m excited for the new Taylor Swift album. I watched the Eras Tour and I really love the fact that she does an acoustic bit all by herself. It’s such a global event, her show, but to make a point of doing that inside of her show was actually really amazing and cool of her to do. She’s a great songwriter. I think the biggest problem she might have is that she’s so extremely good looking. You know, people have jealous reactions to that stuff like that. I know Courtney Love is not a fan. I’ve been a friend of Courtney Love, but I disagree with her opinion about that.

Courtney Love did so much, but she also has a lot of opinions.

It’s her job to have the punk ethics and push against what’s popular in the culture. And that’s why she’s great. She’s written great songs. All hail Courtney Love, but I consider Taylor Swift to be very important at this time in our culture.

I wanted to ask you about when you first started. One of the artists that you mentioned as an influence in that Howard Stern clip was Led Zeppelin.

Right. We didn’t have female role models. There weren’t any women out there really doing rock and roll. We wanted to be the Beatles first, and then we wanted to be Led Zeppelin. Being military brats, we didn’t have any problems just doing it, no matter whether you expected it or not. We didn’t need anyone’s permission to rock. I actually just made a sign that says, “PERMISSION TO ROCK!” I’m going to try and work it into the show to ask the audience: “Do we have permission to rock?” And everybody would say “Yeah!”

A couple months ago I wrote about Ladies Rock Camp, where women learn confidence through playing instruments in rock bands. We did an exercise where we wrote ourselves permission slips, like asking ourselves what we would give ourselves permission to do —

That is cool!

If you could go back in time, are there things that you wish you’d given yourself permission to do sooner?

Giving ourselves permission to join [the band] The Army and see the world in a rock band, the thing that you have to sacrifice to choose that life is, “What about starting a family? What about being a mom?” In a lucrative business situation, when do you tell everyone and all of their families that you want to stop and start your family? And then resume the business? So that was one of the biggest challenges and balancing acts and the bigger struggle that I faced later, after the Heart thing was really huge. And I was like, “Wait a second. I’m going to start a family pretty soon. My biological clock, you know, has almost dried out.” But that it worked out for me. I took control of my destiny and I did it the way I needed to do it. And then I got back in the band, and then my kids were old enough to go on my bus on tour with me. As a woman, I think that was the most challenging to balance out.

It just sounds like during these different phases of your life, the way you tour and do your job must have changed so much.

Yeah. The landscape of being on a rock and roll tour, the way we do it. We don’t have pre-record. We really do everything live, in person, on the spot, one time only. We have skin in the game. So being as healthy as possible and resting as much as you can is a really huge part of getting that rock on.

We just kind of choose to do the old fashioned method of showing up and doing it — singing, really singing, really playing. Sometimes when stuff happens, it’s not perfect. Like, somebody goes, “Whoops! Stop the train, we’ve got to start the song over again.” That happened to us on New Year’s Eve in Seattle and we had to start over again. And people loved it. It’s like, “Wow, it’s real!” It’s more of an unusual situation nowadays to see something that is completely authentic.

Imagining yourself at the age you are now, did you ever think, “I’m still going to be doing it on my terms with my sister?”

I kind of did always think that like, interestingly, as a little kid wannabe rock star. Before the first album came out and it region-by-region gradually got big, and we played in every place that had electricity in order to put it on the map, I always thought it was going to work because we were proficient musicians and Ann’s voice is so unusually good, you know? She has a rock ‘n’ roll voice that’s on the level of Chris Cornell. It’s on the level of a Robert Plant and she got a lot from Plant as a singer. I got a lot from Jimmy Page as a guitar player. We felt we had what it took, and we weren’t afraid to give ourselves permission and just go for it.

When I told people this week I would be talking to you, at least three different women I talked to said, “Ask about the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ cover from 2012! What was it like to play for them?” Why do you think your performance honoring Led Zeppelin at the Kennedy Center has had such a staying power with people?

I love that that’s become its own iconic viral sort of thing. Everyone who sees it for the first time is really strongly affected. And I think one of the reasons why is there’s been a growing sense of a lack of continuity in rock ‘n’ roll and pop music, where people are kind of grabbing back onto their legacy acts. There’s a lot of bands that are going back out — like Heart, like Def Leppard and Billy Joel. There’s a sense of family, like historic musical family, that people have felt was missing before.

So when you see a song like “Stairway to Heaven” presented in such a gloriously powerful fashion with all the reveal after reveal after reveal after reveal, the way the Kennedy Center musical direction had planned it so beautifully, then I think it made a deeper impression than just how cool the moment was. I think it was the longing for a familiar musical territory that goes meaningfully forward through the timeline of music history. That’s my thesis.

If you go

Heart’s Royal Flush Tour comes to Amalie Arena in Tampa at 8 p.m. on Friday. Cheap Trick will open. Tickets are still available via Ticketmaster.com, with prices starting at $31.25 (excluding fees). www.heart-music.com.