Ann Wilson Celebrates B-Day, Chats On LAUNCH

06/18/1999 4:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Craig Rosen

(6/18/99, 1 p.m. PDT) - On Saturday (June 19), singer/ multi-instrumentalist Ann Wilson of Heart and the Lovemongers turns 48. On Tuesday (June 22) at 2:30 p.m. PDT, Wilson and her sister Nancy will chat live on LAUNCH from the green room of The Tonight Show With Jay Leno, which will feature a performance from the duo that night.

Wilson has had quite a year: Heart's Greatest Hits album was released, the band was immortalized on VH1's Behind The Music, the Lovemongers released a Christmas album, and she also performed as a featured vocalist in the Seattle run of Teatro Zinzanni--Love, Chaos & Dinner, a European-style cabaret, which had the rocker singing the music of Cole Porter and George Gershwin.

Ann, who toured with Heart--without sister/ bandmate Nancy Wilson--last summer, is touring with her sister this summer. The sisters aren't using the Heart or Lovemongers moniker; instead, they are just calling themselves simply Ann & Nancy Wilson.

"We're not bound by the Heart tradition," Ann Wilson explained. "Heart is now a brand name that we worked really hard on, and now we're not selling that brand of soap. It's funny how you could get kind of caught up without even knowing it...you can kind of get into a prison of your own making with a big-name band like that. And all of a sudden you look around yourself, and you go, 'Jesus, I don't want to do this.' I want Heart to be just as honest as the Lovemongers. But people won't seem to allow you to do it. They want us to do all those songs by 'Mutt' Lange, those 'Alone' and 'These Dreams' type things, and be up in the Celine Dion category. And that's not really where we're at."

-- Brian Ives, New York

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