Concerts

Hear Ann Wilson play songs you know by Heart (and others) in Beverly

The powerhouse vocalist will select from her band's '70s and '80s favorites and her new solo album at The Cabot on July 21.

3 minutes to read

Heart contributed to the soundtrack of millions of lives with a string of hits between 1976’s “Magic Man” and 1990’s (widely maligned: see here, here, here, and here) “All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You” from their multi-platinum ’70s rock albums and ’80s pop albums.

Since the ’90s, Ann and Nancy Wilson have reappeared sporadically with new material, live recordings, holiday albums, and re-workings of previously released songs.

Elder sister Ann is back this year with a new solo album. While 2007’s “Hope & Glory” and 2018’s “Immortal” consisted almost exclusively of covers, “Fierce Bliss” includes seven tracks co-written by Wilson (a bonus track on the CD and digital formats brings the total to eight).

In a phone interview with Boston.com, Wilson credited “the peace and quiet of the COVID lockdown time” for her songwriting spurt.

“I had lots of time to relax and be introspective and look inward. I guess I just started writing down things that were in my heart and my soul.”

She is quoted in a press release as saying of the lead-off track and first single, “Greed,” “It’s an aggressive song and I think I write best when I’m angry.”

When I asked her to elaborate, she said, “I think when I’m a little pissed off, I tend to not choose my words so carefully … There’s some sort of filter that goes away and you just have to vent.”

She then offered ample evidence of how anger has served as a fertile muse in the past.

“That’s how I wrote the words for ‘Barracuda’ and ‘Crazy On You.’ And there’s a song on [the 1980 Heart album] ‘Bebe Le Strange’ called ‘Break.’ There’s ‘Even It Up,’ there’s ‘Down On Me.’ There’s all kinds of examples.”

Two other originals were composed and produced with Warren Haynes of Gov’t Mule.

“Warren and I have been friends for a while,” she told me. “He wanted to write something with me that was an epic, sort of extended song, like Zeppelin’s ‘Rain Song’ … So he sent me a demo of just him playing his guitar, and that turned into ‘Gladiator.’”

“Angel’s Blues,” the previously referenced bonus track, is the other Wilson/Haynes joint effort.

Another somewhat unexpected appearance on the album is made by country superstar Vince Gill, who duets on a glorious version of Queen’s “Love of My Life.”

“I thought of him because typically when a man and a woman do a duet, the man is kind of the more aggressive, more kind of gruff voice and the woman is [mocking tone] the little flower,” she explained. “Because my voice is more rock, I wanted the male voice to be angelic.”

Doing justice to a song originally sung by Freddie Mercury is quite an achievement. However, Wilson’s unblemished instrument is also capable of handling songs originally heard in the voices of Jeff Buckley (“Forget Her”), Annie Lennox (“Missionary Man”), and the lesser-known James Dewar (Robin Trower’s “Bridge of Sighs”). (The latter two feature Kenny Wayne Shepherd on lead guitar.)

“I feel like certain songs hit me in a way that is so deep that I gotta get inside them,” she said of her choice of others’ recordings.

Fans in the vicinity of Beverly’s Cabot Theatre or Webster’s Indian Ranch can behold the commitment that she brings to every performance on July 21 or July 23.

And fans everywhere can look forward to the in-the-works Heart biopic, of which Carrie Brownstein is the writer and director.

“Of anyone I can think of,” Wilson averred of the Sleater-Kinney singer/guitarist and “Portlandia” star, “she would probably get it right, because she’s in a band herself, and she’s a woman, and she knows exactly what the trip is there.”