Ann Wilson is Still in the Game: A Review of Another Door (2023)

In the 1970s and 1980s, if you were a middle-class, suburban kid, rock music was the air you breathed. 

What we now call "classic rock" was once vital to anyone who envisioned a life beyond high school, who wanted to find that magical place where Jimmy Page conjured gold out of vinyl. 

You only have to read Lester Bangs today to see how much rock music mattered in that era. We weren't just fans; we were obsessives. 

Yet female fans often had to come at rock music from an angle. To this day, I still do not know if I wanted to date Keith Richards or be Keith Richards back then.

I did know by fourteen that the guy who got that guitar and learned how to make it talk was probably having a lot more fun than Mary in her swaying dress. There is a reason that, as late as 2020, music critic Lisa Robinson could plausibly title her book of essays Nobody Ever Asked Me About the Girls (Henry Holt & Co.)

This is why I am pleased to report that Ann Wilson’s new album, Another Door, with the band Tripsitter, is superb. 

Ann Wilson (b. June 19, 1950) is the lead singer of Heart, a highly successful band she co-founded in the 1970s with her guitarist sister Nancy Wilson. Songs like Barracuda, Magic Man, and Dog and Butterfly still live on classic rock radio and conjure that witchy, addled era. 

In the style of the day, the sisters were skinny, sexy, louche, and loud. They could rock like the men and look incredible doing it. Along with Stevie Nicks, Ann Wilson opened up rock music for all those young women who loved the guys—Wilson is a lifelong fan of Led Zeppelin—but wanted some of the stage for themselves. 

Her voice could move effortlessly from a whisper to a full-throated wail in the span of a few seconds. She sang big, but she also modulated beautifully.  And listen again to the sly way she intones, “ah, barra-coo-da” towards the end of that classic rock standard. It is obvious why so many teen-aged guys also adored her.

On Another Door, released in 2023, the voice is still rich but ragged, as befits a woman in her early seventies who has lived the life Ann Wilson has lived. Of course, ragged for Ann Wilson is still better than almost anyone else in popular music today. 

The album kicks off with Tripsitter, a song that evokes that mystical Bonham and Page spookiness. When Wilson joins in at the 50 second mark, it is the aural equivalent of a spotlight hitting the diva. You pay attention.

Other stand-out tracks include This is Now, Waiting for Magic, and Rain of Hell. Any one of these songs, in a saner age, would fly up the charts.

The band, comprised of guitarists Ryan Wariner and Tom Bukovac, keyboardist Paul Moak, bassist Tony Lucido, and drummer Sean T. Lane, bring consummate professionalism to the mix. Like Bob Dylan’s touring band, these guys know what they are doing. They complement the star; they don’t compete with her. They also swagger with aplomb.

Just when the listener settles comfortably into the album, it hits you with Little Things. The song starts slowly, Wilson sounding like Randy Newman or John Prine if either of those men were a woman and had been in Heart. The swirly finish hints of Pink Floyd without tripping into nostalgia.

Here's the main thing about Ann Wilson: her voice at full throttle is as big as a stadium, but she can slow things down and break your heart when she wants to. Track 11, Miss One and Only, ends the album on an appropriately elegiac and wistful note.

While the album is not overtly thematic, one gets the sense that Wilson is looking back on a life full of strange highs and lows and ahead to how she and her music fit in the current popular landscape.

She has admitted more than once that the MTV turn of Heart in the mid-1980s was a soul-crushing experience, but that can be forgiven now. Ann Wilson is an artist who refuses to rest on her laurels. 

And who can still give Robert Plant a run for his money.

Available at: https://annwilson.com/