HEART

THE OFFICIAL HEART YOUTUBE PAGE

http://www.heart-music.com
http://www.facebook.com/heart
http://twitter.com/officialheart
http://www.myspace.com/heart
http://www.myspace.com/officialannwilson
http://www.myspace.com/officialnancywilson

"There's not an inauthentic, fictitious or posing bone in the body of this album," says Nancy Wilson. "Whether it's smart or not, there's no posing going on here whatsoever. We're telling our story. At one point, I said to Ann and Ben, ..What we're doing in the studio with this album, this is the way we the Indians used to do it. You make a fire, and then you sit around the fire and tell your stories and pass them on with a real sense of one on one human contact. We feel like we made quite a fire together."

Red Velvet Car is like a Second Coming, because it represents a kind of homecoming to the sort of original, powerful, deeply personal works like 1976's Dreamboat Annie, 1977's Little Queen and 1978's Dog & Butterfly that helped Heart earn its good name in rock history in the first place. Indeed, Red Velvet Car seems infinitely more deeply rooted to those records than Heart's more recent platinum commercial triumphs of the Eighties and Nineties, such as 1985's Heart, 1987's Bad Animals or 1990's Brigade. In this way, Red Velvet Car completes Heart's journey back to their original musical passions that the Wilson sisters have been working towards ever since on increasingly strong efforts like 1993's Desire Walks On, 1995's The Road Home, 2003's Alive In Seattle, 2004's Jupiter's Darling, 2007's Dreamboat Annie Live, as well as their work as The Lovemongers and Hope & Glory, Ann's exquisite solo album. Red Velvet Car is the beautiful and unforgettable place Heart's road home has taken them.

"We were definitely making a devil's bargain in the Eighties, and looking back I'm glad we did because it did allow us to transit over a period when we could have fallen into a black hole," Ann Wilson explains. "But we wouldn't want to go back there and make any more music we don't feel totally connected to. And now with this album, we feel like we have something very solid to stand on. It's so great to work with Ben Mink because he's not only a great set of ears, but also a great soul."

Mink -- a producer, songwriter, composer, and multi-instrumentalist -- caught the attention of the Wilson sisters with a body of work that has included projects with everyone from k.d. lang to Rush and Barenaked Ladies. "Ben was hard to wrestle him down to the ground to work with us," says Ann. "When we were trying to pull Heart up from out of the Eighties ten or fifteen years ago, he didn't quite see it yet. Later on, we did the solo album and hit it off, and now the time and place was right."

If Jupiter's Darling was built upon Nancy Wilson's guitar collaboration with Heart's Craig Bartock, Red Velvet Car was founded on Nancy's acoustic guitar chemistry with Ben Mink. Together, they kick up the sort of sparks that conjure up the same acoustic fire that Led Zeppelin had once upon a time. "I think that's where Ben Mink and I really match each other as players," explains Nancy Wilson. "Because I've played a very rocking acoustic guitar in a big rock band setting for so long, I don't play a shy acoustic if you know what I mean. And Ben has that same ability. There's so much expression you can get out of an acoustic guitar especially when it's well recorded. Ben and me were playing and say, "Wow, were we separated at birth?" There's some nice electric guitar on the album too, but for instance, "There You Go" is heavier because there isn't an electric track, and so you hear every grain of wood.

less