In June 1987, director Marty Callner stood Ann Wilson on a balcony above a crumbling stage set.
Far below her, Nancy Wilson sat alone at a grand piano among the painted ruins.
Ann wore black from head to toe, a long gown and veil like a widow in a gothic novel.
The staging deliberately borrowed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, pop music dressing itself as Shakespeare.
For the length of one quiet verse, the older sister sang down to the younger like a confession.
Then the chorus detonated, all synthesizers and guitars, and the piano beneath Nancy collapsed on cue.
It was a music video built like a small opera, and cameras rolled to preserve it.
The single it promoted had been in shops for a month, climbing slowly and unspectacularly.
Nobody on that set was filming a sure thing, whatever later memory suggests.
The song being staged had already failed twice in public, under two different names.
It had died quietly on an album by the two men who wrote it.
It had died again as a television single sung by actors in character.
There was just one problem.
Songs with that kind of history are usually finished, and everyone in the business knew it.
All along, the song was waiting for the right voice.
That voice belonged to a woman who had been a star for more than a decade already.
Ann Wilson had conquered arenas in the nineteen-seventies with songs she wrote beside her sister.
The comeback she and Nancy had engineered two years earlier still felt fragile.
Now she was about to conquer them again with a song written by strangers.
Two Songwriters and One Album to Their Name
Billy Steinberg and Tom Kelly were professional songwriters who usually worked for other singers.
In 1983, they briefly became a band themselves, recording under the name i-Ten.
Their single album, Taking a Cold Look, was released that year by Epic Records.
The record was recorded in Van Nuys, California, with producers Keith Olsen and Steve Lukather.
Guitarist Lukather and pianist Alan Pasqua both played on the sessions.
The ballad “Alone” sat third in the album’s running order, sung by Kelly himself.
Almost nobody heard it, because the album sank without promotion or radio support.
Within a short time, the i-Ten project had been quietly abandoned altogether.
The song went back into the writers’ catalogue, filed among other beautiful failures.
Steinberg later said the pair never stopped believing the song deserved another chance.
The Sitcom Detour
The second chance arrived in late 1984 wearing a television costume.
CBS was airing Dreams, a sitcom about a young Philadelphia band chasing success.
In an episode named for the song, the fictional band performed it at an anniversary party.
Actress Valerie Stevenson sang it in character as the band’s singer, Lisa Copley.
Beside her, playing the group’s drummer, stood a young actor named John Stamos.
Stamos recorded the song with Stevenson years before Full House made him famous.
The episode aired on November 7, 1984, and a single was released the same day.
The single did not chart, and the network cancelled the series within weeks.
For the song, television exposure without a hit record amounted to another burial.
Twice now, the ballad had been offered to America, and twice America had shrugged.
The Writers Become Hitmakers
Steinberg and Kelly answered those failures by writing hits for nearly everyone else.
Their song “Like a Virgin” carried Madonna to number one in 1984.
Two years later, Cyndi Lauper took their “True Colors” to the top as well.
Their Whitney Houston song, “So Emotional,” was on its way to number one as well.
Suddenly the pair ranked among the most sought-after songwriters in Los Angeles.
Their catalogue held one conspicuous orphan that no success had managed to rescue.
According to Steinberg, the writers recorded a brand-new demo of the old ballad.
This time, they were not pitching it generally, but aiming it at specific singers.
The demo was headed north, toward two sisters rebuilding a famous band.
The Demo Reaches Seattle
Heart had survived the early nineteen-eighties by changing almost everything except the sisters.
Their 1985 comeback had been built openly on outside songwriters and glossy production.
The strategy had returned them to number one with “These Dreams” in 1986.
When the new demo arrived, the sisters heard what the song had been missing.
Its verses asked for intimacy, and its chorus asked for a vocal eruption.
Very few rock singers could cross that distance honestly inside four minutes.
Ann Wilson had built her entire reputation crossing exactly that kind of distance.
The band agreed to cut the song for the album then taking shape.
Inside the Bad Animals Sessions
Bad Animals would be the ninth studio album of the band’s career.
Producer Ron Nevison, who had directed the comeback album, returned to supervise the sessions.
Nevison’s method favored scale: bright synthesizers, thunderous drums, and choruses built for stadiums.
Everything about the production aimed at American radio’s loudest, brightest settings.
Steinberg and Kelly visited the studio while the band was recording the album.
Kelly, a seasoned session singer, ended up adding high harmonies throughout the record.
On “Alone,” his voice hovers above the choruses, a bright thread behind Ann’s lead.
The writer had finally been allowed to help finish his own song.
The sessions also produced the rocker “Who Will You Run To” and Nancy’s showcase “There’s the Girl.”
All along, the song was waiting for the right voice.
The Piano, the Whisper, the Eruption
The finished recording opens with a lone piano and a voice kept deliberately small.
Ann sings the first verse the way a person admits something after midnight.
The story inside the song concerns a woman alone with thoughts of a particular man.
Their paths keep crossing, yet she has never told him what she actually feels.
In the song’s telling, she finally resolves to say it and end her isolation.
You may know that suspended hour yourself, the confession rehearsed and never delivered.
Nearly everyone has composed the brave message in darkness and swallowed it by morning.
Then the chorus arrives like a door kicked open, synthesizers and guitars surging together.
Cash Box, reviewing the single, called her vocal performance billowing and riveting.
The astonishment lives in the control, because the whisper and the eruption are one voice.
The track runs barely three and a half minutes, yet it feels almost architectural.
Few power ballads of the decade trusted their singer with so much empty space.
A Video Borrowed From Shakespeare
The music video, directed by Marty Callner, appeared in June 1987.
It opened with the balcony staging, Ann singing down toward Nancy at the piano.
Ann appeared dressed entirely in black, gown and veil, inside a crumbling theatrical set.
In later passages, Nancy was shown riding a black horse through the scenery.
At the climax, the sisters faced one another as the song reached its fullest cry.
The film ends on a close portrait of Ann before the picture fades to black.
Television repeated the clip all summer, fixing the song’s gothic grandeur in public memory.
Three Weeks at the Top of America
Capitol released the single on May 16, 1987, as the album’s advance calling card.
Its flip side offered fans a live recording of the old warhorse “Barracuda.”
The record entered the Billboard Hot 100 at a modest number fifty-three.
Radio added it week after week, and the climb steepened steadily through June.
On the chart dated July 11, the song displaced Whitney Houston at number one.
It remained there for three consecutive weeks, ruling the center of that summer.
For three weeks, the biggest song in America belonged to two sisters and a borrowed ballad.
Bob Seger’s “Shakedown” finally took the crown from it on August 1.
The song also reached number one in Canada and on the Cash Box chart.
In Britain, it climbed to number three and became Heart’s first top-forty single there.
It remains the band’s only single ever to reach the British top five.
On Billboard’s adult contemporary chart it stopped at number two, and rock radio took it to three.
Billboard’s year-end chart ranked it the second-biggest single of all 1987.
Only the Bangles’ hit “Walk Like an Egyptian” finished that year ahead of it.
The Album and the Honor
Bad Animals itself peaked at number two on the Billboard album chart.
The album went on to sell three million copies in the United States.
In Canada, its sales certification eventually reached four times platinum.
The follow-up single “Who Will You Run To” climbed to number seven that autumn.
“Who Will You Run To” had been written by Diane Warren, another outside specialist.
A third single, “There’s the Girl,” sung by Nancy, reached number twelve.
At the Grammy Awards in 1988, the performance earned a nomination for the band.
The nomination honored the best pop vocal performance by a duo or group.
“Alone” was the band’s second consecutive number one, following “These Dreams.”
It would also prove to be the last number one of their career.
The Song Refuses to Retire
Heart themselves revisited the song acoustically on the 1995 live album The Road Home.
Stripped of synthesizers, the performance proved the melody could survive on voice alone.
In 2007, Celine Dion recorded the song for her album Taking Chances.
Her version, produced by Ben Moody, was released as a single in 2008.
In 2010, Canadian singer Alyssa Reid rebuilt its chorus into her hit “Alone Again.”
In Britain, the original single eventually earned a platinum certification in the streaming era.
Classic Pop magazine later named it the greatest power ballad of the nineteen-eighties.
Every generation of powerhouse singers now treats the recording as a measuring stick.
Attempting it means auditioning, fairly or not, against one performance from 1987.
A borrowed song became the signature she never wrote.
Heart: The First Women of Hard Rock
A Marine Officer’s Daughters
Ann Dustin Wilson was born on June 19, 1950, in San Diego, California.
Nancy Lamoureux Wilson was born on March 16, 1954, in San Francisco.
An older sister, Lynn, completed the trio of Wilson daughters.
Their father, John Wilson, was an officer in the United States Marine Corps.
His postings moved the family repeatedly, including stretches in Taiwan and Panama.
At every stop, the household ran on music, from Ray Charles to Judy Garland.
The family eventually settled in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb across the lake from Seattle.
In February 1964, the sisters watched the Beatles perform on American television at their grandmother’s home.
Ann was thirteen that night, and Nancy was only nine years old.
The broadcast fixed their ambition more firmly than any childhood promise could.
The sisters later credited their disciplined, wandering upbringing with their professional stamina.
The Shy Girl Who Found Her Voice
Ann was a shy child who spoke with a stutter in ordinary conversation.
Singing gave her a fluency that everyday speech had always denied her.
By her own account, singing was where the shy girl disappeared entirely.
She graduated from Sammamish High School in Bellevue in 1968.
She attended Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle before music consumed everything.
By then, she was already singing with local bands around the Seattle area.
One of those bands was assembling, name by name, into something historic.
Ann Follows the Band North
The band’s roots reached back to 1965 and bassist Steve Fossen’s group, the Army.
Guitarist Roger Fisher played beside Fossen through every early incarnation of the project.
The group performed as Hocus Pocus and later as White Heart around Washington.
Roger’s brother Mike knew Ann, and her voice entered the band’s orbit through him.
In the early nineteen-seventies, Ann joined the group and became its lead singer.
When Mike Fisher moved to Canada after receiving a draft notice, Ann followed him north.
Vancouver offered clubs, rehearsal rooms, and an audience willing to listen closely.
By 1973, the musicians had settled permanently on the single name Heart.
Nancy Completes the Band
In 1974, Nancy Wilson arrived from Washington and joined her sister full-time.
She brought rhythm guitar, harmony singing, and a second songwriter’s pen to the group.
Ann also played flute, giving the heavy band an unexpected pastoral thread.
Session player Howard Leese became a full member on guitar and keyboards.
Drummer Michael Derosier completed the lineup that would conquer Canada first.
Producer Mike Flicker guided their demo sessions and championed the young band.
Flicker would go on to produce the first five albums of the band’s career.
Vancouver club audiences were hearing something genuinely unprecedented in rock music.
Two women were fronting a hard rock band as writers, players, and singers.
Dreamboat Annie Crosses the Border
The debut album, Dreamboat Annie, was recorded in Vancouver for the Mushroom label.
Released in Canada in September 1975, it sold thirty thousand copies within months.
That October, a Montreal promoter needed an opening act for Rod Stewart in a hurry.
The scheduled opener had cancelled, and Heart was offered the slot a day ahead.
The band flew across the continent overnight and played the Montreal Forum.
The album reached the United States in 1976 and climbed to number seven.
“Magic Man” climbed to number nine on the American singles chart that year.
Its companion single, “Crazy on You,” reached number thirty-five.
Both songs had been written by Ann and Nancy together.
A small Canadian album had carried two sisters onto the American chart.
Barracuda and the Label War
The second album, Little Queen, followed in 1977 with a harder electric edge.
Its single “Barracuda” charged to number eleven and became an enduring signature song.
Ann had written its furious lyric in a hotel room after an interviewer’s insulting suggestion about the sisters.
A full-page label advertisement with a suggestive caption angered the sisters deeply.
The dispute helped push the band to break its contract with Mushroom Records.
Lawyers argued while two labels issued competing Heart albums in the same season.
The recalled Magazine album was remixed, partly re-recorded, and reissued in 1978.
Dog and Butterfly, released in October 1978, still managed double platinum sales.
In 1979, the Fisher brothers left the band, closing its turbulent first era.
The Lean Years
Bebe le Strange reached number five in 1980, the group’s third top-ten album.
A cover of “Tell It Like It Is” reached number eight that same year.
The band toured seventy-seven cities behind Bebe le Strange in 1980.
In May 1982, the band opened a sold-out stadium concert headlined by Queen.
Yet Private Audition that year sold poorly despite such prominent stages.
Passionworks followed in 1983 with similarly disappointing commercial results.
Its single “How Can I Refuse” did top the mainstream rock chart, briefly.
Fossen and Derosier, founding members, were dismissed from the band during the slump.
A group that had conquered two countries suddenly struggled for a record deal’s patience.
The Capitol Bargain
In 1985, Heart moved to Capitol Records and accepted a glamorous new makeover.
The acoustic and folk colors of the early records were deliberately minimized.
Outside writers supplied most songs, and Ron Nevison polished the sound to brightness.
The sisters’ own songwriting, once the band’s engine, was largely set aside.
The self-titled Heart album reached number one and sold five million copies.
It produced four top-ten singles, something the band had never managed before.
Nancy sang lead on “These Dreams,” which topped the chart in March 1986.
The bargain delivered everything except the feeling that the music was theirs.
Two years later, one borrowed ballad would quietly settle that argument forever.
After the Summit
In 1990, Brigade became the band’s sixth multi-platinum album in America.
Its lead single, “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You,” stopped at number two.
Desire Walks On followed in 1993 and eventually earned a gold certification.
Alongside the band, the sisters formed the acoustic side project the Lovemongers.
With collaborator Sue Ennis, the Lovemongers returned the sisters to small rooms and harmonies.
The Lovemongers’ recording of “The Battle of Evermore” appeared on the Singles soundtrack in 1992.
In 1995, John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin produced their live album The Road Home.
At home in Seattle, the sisters also ran a recording studio named Bad Animals.
That year, Nancy stepped back from the band to begin raising her family.
Ann, meanwhile, had adopted a daughter in 1991 and would adopt a son in 1998.
By 1998, Heart had gone quiet, and the band’s future looked genuinely uncertain.
The Sisters Return
In 2002, Ann and Nancy returned to the road with a rebuilt Heart lineup.
Jupiters Darling, released in 2004, was the band’s first studio album in eleven years.
Its songs leaned back toward the folk and hard rock blend of the beginning.
Ann released her first solo album, Hope and Glory, in 2007.
Red Velvet Car reached number ten in 2010, the group’s first top-ten album in twenty years.
That December, the sisters performed for service members at a Marine Corps air station in San Diego.
The daughters of a Marine officer were singing for Marines, a family circle closing quietly.
A Star, a Memoir, and a Stairway
In September 2012, the sisters published their joint memoir, Kicking and Dreaming.
On September 25 that year, they received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
That December, they performed at the Kennedy Center Honors in tribute to Led Zeppelin.
An orchestra, two choirs, and drummer Jason Bonham accompanied their performance that night.
Bonham was playing in the seat his late father John had made legendary.
Together they performed “Stairway to Heaven,” the song that had defined their heroes.
Robert Plant watched from the honorees’ box and was visibly moved to tears.
The performance earned a standing ovation and spread rapidly across the internet.
The performance video gathered more than four million views within five days online.
The Hall of Fame Reunion
On April 18, 2013, Heart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Seattle musician Chris Cornell of Soundgarden delivered the induction speech that evening.
Cornell described Ann and Nancy as heroes and role models for Seattle musicians.
The Hall’s own biography calls the sisters pioneers of women fronting hard rock bands.
Then the original six members performed together for the first time in thirty-four years.
They chose “Crazy on You,” the song that had introduced them to America in 1976.
Roger Fisher, Steve Fossen, Michael Derosier, and Howard Leese stood beside the sisters again.
The band had first been nominated the previous year and passed over entirely.
The sisters simply never stopped being sisters.
Return now to that film set in June 1987, and to the balcony above the ruins.
Ann stands in black at the railing, dressed for a tragedy older than rock and roll.
Below her, Nancy waits at a piano that the crew has rigged to collapse.
Neither sister can see the three weeks of chart history waiting just ahead.
Neither can see the Grammy nomination, the covers, or the Hall of Fame beyond it.
All along, the song was waiting for the right voice.
It had waited through an ignored album and a cancelled sitcom without changing a note.
Then it found the one singer who could make its silence sound enormous.
It remains, all these years later, the biggest hit the sisters ever carried.
The piano falls, the chorus lands, and the long waiting finally ends.