“They were happening right before us, kind of as Heart was just starting to tiptoe into the scene, and they already had Rumours out there,” the guitarist remembered. “We were just trying so hard to make an album and get out there and get a tour or whatever, and they were all over the radio.”
As Wilson explained, her envy wasn’t just about commercial success. She also believed Fleetwood Mac’s popularity could hinder Heart’s chances.
“I felt so jealous of that band because there was two women in it that sounded so good together, and they had the acoustic guitar kind of thing that I felt like I was bringing a lot of into our band,” she noted. “They kind of had it already, you know, like something we were trying to capture. They had already captured it. So I was really like, ‘Damn it! What makes us so different now?’”
'Lucky for Us, We Had Ann'
As history shows, Wilson’s fears were unnecessary. Heart forged its own path, and despite having two women, was rarely compared to Fleetwood Mac. The guitarist believes her sister, vocalist Ann Wilson, helped set them apart.
“We did sound very different,” Nancy noted. “A lot of it's Ann's voice, you know, very signature. The muscle and the power that she possesses and the way she sings is completely its own thing. So lucky for us, we had Ann."
According to Nancy, Ann's distinctive vocals allowed Heart to create a more varied sound.
"Not just soft rock. We had hard rock, so we could rock very hard and as quietly as well. So we probably had a lot more versatility or something.”
Stevie Nicks has spoken often about her past drug use, but Nancy and Ann Wilson of Heart said Nicks was "pissed" when they wrote about it in their book.
In the 1980s, Stevie Nicks befriended Ann and Nancy Wilson of the band Heart. Decades later, the Wilson sisters published a book about their lives in the music industry. According to the two women, Nicks didn’t like being mentioned in the tell-all memoir. Some of the anecdotes in the book reportedly showed a hard-partying side to Nicks that she wasn’t comfortable sharing with the public. This may come as a surprise, though, as Nicks has always been open about her drug use in interviews.
Stevie Nicks became good friends with Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart in the early 1980s, Nicks had cemented her place as one of the biggest musicians on the planet. She had one of the top-selling albums in the world with Fleetwood Mac and had established herself as a profitable solo artist. Around this time, she befriended Ann and Nancy Wilson.
In Kicking and Dreaming, the Wilson sisters wrote about Nicks’ drug use.
“When it came to drugs, though, we couldn’t keep up with Stevie,” Nancy wrote. “She had a system where she could do various substances, and then do other substances to help her sleep. We never knew how to do that, and, at some point, we had to leave to sleep.”
After publishing Kicking and Dreaming in 2012, the Wilson sisters said that Nicks was not happy with them. She reportedly didn’t like the section of the book that described her drug use.
“Stevie Nicks was really pissed off [about the book],” Ann told the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “She didn’t like being outed as a person who would attend a rock party.”
