Ann Wilson

A Marine's daughter in a Seattle suburb

Ann Dustin Wilson was born in San Diego on 19 June 1950, the daughter of a Marine Corps major. The job moved the family about — spells near military facilities in Panama and Taiwan — before they settled in Bellevue, Washington, in the early 1960s, which is where the music started in earnest.

By the early 1970s she was fronting a Seattle-area band called White Heart. Her younger sister Nancy joined on guitar, the name was shortened, and Heart existed from 1974.

Dreamboat Annie, and the fifty years that followed

Heart's debut, Dreamboat Annie, came out in September 1975 and climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard 200; "Magic Man" reached No. 9 on the Hot 100. The band went on to place top-ten albums across four decades and has sold more than 35 million records worldwide. Wilson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Heart in 2013 and given a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023. The last Heart album of new material was Beautiful Broken, in 2016.

The sisters worked separately for years. That ended on 10 October 2023, when Nancy walked on at Ann's Santa Rosa show for "Barracuda" — their first performance together since 2019 — followed by three surprise concerts that December and then the Royal Flush tour, with a touring band of Ryan Wariner, Ryan Waters, Paul Moak, Tony Lucido and Sean Lane.

The debut got a second official life in 2026: Dreamboat Annie was named a Grammy Hall of Fame inductee, fifty years on, and Heart played "Magic Man", "Dreamboat Annie" and "Crazy on You" at the induction gala at the Beverly Hilton on 8 May.

Tripsitter: a band of session players who wanted out

Wilson's solo catalogue runs from Hope & Glory (2007) through Immortal (2018) and Fierce Bliss (2022) to Another Door in 2023 — eleven originals, and the first record on which she was the sole lyricist. The band she made it with took its name from one of its songs: Tripsitter, a Nashville four-piece of guitarist Ryan Wariner, guitarist and keyboard player Paul Moak, bassist Tony Lucido and drummer Sean Lane. Wilson has described them as A-list studio musicians from Nashville who are tired of being studio musicians.

The working method is deliberately unliterary. They jam, she writes — her description of it is simply that they get together, the band plays and she writes — and she says there are pages and pages of unused material left over from those sessions. A Live In Concert set arrived as a Record Store Day double album in 2024 and was reissued on Blu-ray and digitally in May 2025. By the autumn of 2026 the group had played more than a hundred shows together since 2024.

Their second studio album, Consecrated Ground, was released on 9 October 2026 through Label Logic, nine tracks, trailed by the single "I Will Not Be Coming Back". Spill Magazine's Julie Correll gave it five out of five, calling the record restless, gritty and remarkably alive, with Wilson's voice as its gravitational centre, and noting that she is not trying to recreate the past — the songs range across heavy rock, psychedelia and blues rather than revisiting Heart.

Cancer, a damaged elbow, and a song called "Bone Pain"

In July 2024 Wilson announced a cancer diagnosis, had a tumour removed surgically and went through preventative chemotherapy; Heart's dates came off the calendar. A later fall in a car park added an injured elbow, surgery, and a spell of touring from a wheelchair with her arm in a sling.

That period is on the new album rather than filed away. "Bone Pain", the second track, came out of the side effects of chemotherapy and is the rawest thing on the record. On stage in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, on 2 October 2026 she told the audience the treatment had felt worse than the illness, and that her strength was coming back. In an interview published on 13 October she put her condition plainly: she feels really good.

Where things stand, November 2026

Three strands of work are live at once. The documentary Ann Wilson: In My Voice, directed by Barbara Hall and built from home movies, photographs, journals and unreleased footage, went out on a ten-city North American screening and Q&A run with Wilson and Hall in attendance — Seattle and Vancouver on 11 and 12 May, Chicago, Cleveland and Nashville between 17 and 20 May, New York and Bethel between 27 and 29 May, Toronto and Boston from 30 May to 1 June. Wilson's line on it is that the film is her story in her own words, told the way she has always wanted to tell it. Its UK premiere screened at Regent Street Cinema on 1 November 2026 as part of the Doc'n Roll Festival, with a wider release set for 25 November.

A new Heart album is finished. Wilson confirmed in October 2026 only that it is done and out next year, citing confidentiality on the rest; Nancy Wilson has said it was largely cut live in Nashville with the musicians from the recent tours, and that it feels like a Heart record. It will be the band's first new material since 2016.

Heart's own Royal Flush dates ran through February and March 2026, with Lucinda Williams opening some nights. Wilson then took Tripsitter out for more than twenty shows from September into November — North America from 10 September to 10 October, three Japanese dates in mid-November, and four Australian shows to close: Twin Towns Clubs & Resorts on the Gold Coast on 24 November, Thebarton Theatre in Adelaide on 26 November, the Palais in Melbourne on 29 November and the State Theatre in Sydney on 30 November, with the New Zealand band Dragon supporting. Those four are the dates currently on sale.

On stage with Tripsitter

The billing is Ann Wilson & Tripsitter: The Voice of Heart, and the rooms are seated theatres and casino event centres rather than arenas — Patchogue Theatre, the Ridgefield Playhouse, Wind Creek in Bethlehem. The format is two sets with an interval and no support act in North America, running to roughly two hours, which gives the new songs room to sit next to the Heart catalogue instead of being squeezed around it.

The balance is deliberate. Tripsitter material — "Ruler of the Night", "Tripsitter", "This Is Now", "Miss One and Only" — sits beside "I Will Not Be Coming Back", "Bone Pain" and "Me and Comanche" from Consecrated Ground, with "Love Alive", "Magic Man", "Crazy on You", "Even It Up", "Little Queen", "Sweet Darlin'" and "Barracuda" from the Heart years, and covers drawn from Led Zeppelin ("Going to California", "What Is and What Should Never Be") and the Black Crowes ("She Talks to Angels"). Wilson talks between songs at length; the staging is a five-piece band and a singer, with flute on a few of the older numbers.

Reaction to the autumn run has been warm rather than dutiful. Reviews in October praised the mix of Tripsitter and Heart originals with the selected covers and rated the band highly; ticket-holders at the Bethlehem show, which averaged 4.5 stars on the venue's own listing, wrote that her voice was spot on and that the band killed it.