Heart's Ann Wilson on reuniting with sister, music business and Led Zeppelin ahead of Pittsburgh concert

After several years of strained relationships, a physical altercation in the family and separate solo tours, sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson are back together as Heart.

”Well, there’s no explaining why somebody wants to do music. It’s just, when you want to do it, you want to do it,” Ann Wilson said in a phone call earlier this month. “So did (Nancy), so we just thought, let’s get up there and do it.”

The reunited Heart will bring their Royal Flush tour to PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh on Thursday, alongside fellow Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees Cheap Trick.

“Keeping a band together, you could call it like keeping a marriage together,” Wilson said. “If you pay attention to all the little ins and outs of it and the chemistry of it, then it could work and it could work for a long time. I think Heart is a good example of a creative idea that just goes and goes and goes because it’s a good idea.”

With Ann Wilson’s solo band Tripsitter serving as the backing musicians, Heart will cover their hits, from early rockers like “Barracuda” and “Magic Man” to 1980s power ballads like “What About Love.” There will also be a few covers, plus a solo song from each of the sisters.

“I think a song we’re playing in the show that deserves more attention is called ‘This Is Now,’” she said. “It was actually written by me and my solo band, Tripsitter. But we’re doing it in the Heart show because Nancy really liked it, too. And she asked us to do it. So we’re all doing it. Sounds great.”

For Wilson, the music business of today is “unrecognizable” compared to the early days of the band’s career.

“It doesn’t seem like it’s in the hands of humans these days,” she said. “I feel like it’s more or less been given to the computers to compartmentalize and pick apart all the music and decide which genre they’re part of and then to stick them in that little pigeonhole.

”And that’s a huge difference because there used to be one or two radio stations and you could turn on the radio and just wait until you heard the song you loved and turn that one up, you know?” she adds with a laugh. “A whole lot different.”

Wilson acknowledged that there are more opportunities for bands to be heard in today’s streaming climate.

“But it also takes away some of the quality control,” she said. “If every single person can make an album, then what’s special about that? I don’t know.”

In recent years, Wilson has been going through the Heart archives, finding a treasure trove of photographs and films. As far as music, she added she didn’t want to tire people out with “self-indulgent” material.

“Most of the music stuff, we pretty much gleaned the good stuff, the stuff that was really good enough to publish,” she said. “But a lot of the time, bands will just leave their tape running when they’re in the studio because they think every noise they make and everything they say is just deathless. But that’s not the case with Heart or anybody else, really.”

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Through the years, Heart has acknowledged their love of Led Zeppelin, whether it was playing “Rock and Roll” at their first Pittsburgh show in 1976 or more recent covers of “Going to California” and “The Ocean.”

“We have really mined the whole Zeppelin catalog in our career,” she said. “There have been so many of them that we’ve played, but the ones that I like the best are the sort of later ones, like the things from ‘Houses of the Holy’ and ‘The Rain Song.’”

In 2012, at the Kennedy Center Honors, Heart played the iconic “Stairway to Heaven” at an event paying tribute to Led Zeppelin, with Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones in attendance.

“Oh, it was tons and tons of pressure, but we decided not to really get locked in the pressure in that moment,” she said. “We kept focused, because the whole thing was to go and do a good job on that song and make Zeppelin happy really, and I think we did that. That was our mission.”

As for what the future holds, Wilson could see new Heart music sometime down the road.

“I would imagine so. I think so. We’ve only just recently gotten into this tour, so the whole idea in doing it was to see how it worked and see how it feels and see if we get ideas for new songs,” she said. “And because these Tripsitter guys that are in the band now are excellent songwriters and they have great musical ideas, and Nancy and I are both, well, especially me, I’m a lyricist, so I’m always looking for great musical ideas. I think that’ll happen.”