Heart's Change in Style

I've been listening to the band Heart lately. I've always been a casual fan, and I'm only now listening to their earlier work and deep cuts.

It seems to me as though they almost had two separate careers. I know that their 1985 self-titled album was a blockbuster, but I'm curious as to whether it was seen as a significant change for them at the time or simply viewed as their latest album which happened to sell really well. Beginning with that album, the material seems a lot more "glossy" to my ears. Can't think of a better word.

As far as their classic 70s material, it seems like there is no clear consensus as to whether Dreamboat Annie or Little Queen is their masterpiece?

Was anyone a big Heart fan back in the day, and if so do you think of 1985 as the dawn of a second phase in their career or just an extension of their previous work?

 

The move to Capitol and the videos made for their "Heart" disc cried sellout in my eyes...MTV shares the blame with the band of course...IIRC the majority of the songs in their earlier career were band penned with little outside assistance...they then relied more on outside writers and they became at least to me a faceless band losing a big part of what made them successful in the early days...

 

Then there's the modern era, I call METAL Heart. I find it yucky. The METAL approach also happened to another favorite...RUSH. I'm not happy with either band's autumn years.

 

The self-titled is when I walked away. I loved both the hard rockin' cowbell hittin' stuff and the acoustic ballads but haven't really liked anything since they changed their style.

 

They definitely changed their style after the 1985 album.

 

Heart basically reinvented themselves in the hair band era as a female version of Poison. The new fan base was very different from the old fan base.

 

"Dreamboat Annie" (the song, not the album) might be the best 2 minutes of folk pop ever recorded. I wish that song was 4 minutes long.

Always loved the Wilson sisters - great talents. Ann's voice back in the day was one of the best in rock. I just didn't always love the direction they took as artists.

But when they were on, they were very, very good.

 

The "glamming" up of Ann and Nancy may have played well on MTV but it definitely destroyed their credibility earned while growing up musically from Canada and Seattle into the mainstream consciousness...

 

It was a fun pop album for 1985. Haven't listened to it in ages, but it was part of my first CD player purchase in 1986 (along with Little Richard's Greatest Hits, Led Zeppelin IV, and How to be a Zillionaire).

Like Cheap Trick's "Lap of Luxury," if Heart doesn't make that album, there's probably no more Heart by 1990 or so.

 

I was around in 1985. What everyone who wasn't there at the tine fails to realize is that Heart was coming off several years of stiff albums and minor hits, and they'd been dropped by their prior label (Epic).

I remember hearing "What About Love" early in its chart life, and I could tell it was Heart, but it also had a certain something that none of their singles had had in quite some time. And it wasn't as if the band always recorded only their own stuff; they'd had a hit in 1980 with a version of "Tell It Like It Is."

Regardless what one thinks about their stylistic change - and the Wilson sisters certainly were conflicted about it - it saved and extended their career.

The same would happen with Aerosmith several years later.

 

So True. That song is just fantastic, but way too short.

 

I came in to Heart in the mid-80s when I was a teenager in the UK, when Alone hit the charts, LOVED Bad Animals, There's The Girl is still a big fave. Then circled back to These Dreams.

It was only later I discovered Dreamboat Annie and Little Queen. Absolutely love those two albums. Which is the best? Queen for me but only just.

So it does seem to me like two different bands. Which do I prefer? Well that's as hard a question to answer as which is the best out of DA and LQ.

A fine career.

 

Yeah, I remember all of that.
I always thought "How Can I Refuse" should have been a big hit for them.
But when it wasn't, it seemed like they had run out of steam. They really needed something to kick start their career all over again.
The 1985 album was the first Heart album I ever bought. I knew it was a change of style for them, but it didn't bother me. I knew a lot of people who had that album.
Quite a few hits on there:
What About Love
Never
These Dreams
Nothin' At All.
I love it, but I also love the stuff they did before that.
With their most recent releases, they seem to have run out of steam again. No reason to expect any classic artist to sell a million copies of a new release, but I think the quality of the new music has been sub-par, despite the occasional bright spots.
Still a great career, and who knows, maybe they have another kick start in them!
Maybe they could reunite the Dreamboat Annie lineup for some new music and a tour.

 

Around here in 1975-76 everyone had the 'Dreamboat Annie' LP and the first of the Fleetwood Macs with Buckingham-Nicks in. Members of the original Vancouver based band began dropping away somewhere after the fourth or fifth album and it definitely became a case of the sisters and a lot of production, and a more keyboard based sound, which is what Journey, Styx and Chicago and others were having success with. At the time I thought they had lost a lot of their guts, what made them so kick-ass powerful, but looking back there are some good songs like These Dreams. A different Heart though, sort of like the Trevor Rabin Yes produced by Trevor Horn was still Yes (and of course some Yes fans totally did not believe that, and still don't I guess). It was the '80s... big hair, the look of the video uber alles, lots of production gloss... but underneath that there was still some good music, musicianship and vocals.

A lot of the fallings-out between most of the male band guys and the sisters was just lifestyle really; substances, travel pains, libidos. It was as inevitable as men and women just being different. Woman as rock star isn't a long lasting trip usually, the road is harder without the same rewards.

 

To me the demarcation came when Roger (and Mike) Fisher left in '79. I'd rate the first four albums as more or less equal (and very good) and then everything else. Roger put that band over the top and the loss of his input was a major setback. I suppose one could argue that they recovered from it eventually, but I stopped listening in 1980.

 

They changed with the times, but I really like the S/T album. I also like the album before it Passionworks. Great stuff.

 

Me either. I never thought two of my favorite groups would have recent studio albums that sound like bad Halestorm(Heart) and Dream Theater(Rush)B-sides.

 

I am a huge 70s heart fan, and don't really like the 80s pop metal stuff. With that being said when I saw them playing those songs live I was blown away. The 80s pop sound and bad production was stripped away and what was left were great songs performed with great vocals.

 

With "Mistral Wind", they made a track as brilliant as any Led Zeppelin track they emulated before.

I don't listen to anything of theirs post-Bebe LeStrange. It's just depressing.

 

"Heart" is a great album, IMO of course. Yes they changed from the prior albums but they probably had to at the time.

 

I thought it was awful at the time. The music and especially the videos. Were these even the same people? Didn't look like it. I like Dreamboat Annie over Little Queen.

 

Agree with a lot of what has been said so far. Heart was really becoming an overlooked in the early 80s until the 1985 release, which certainly rekindled their career for a time. But I think they sold their souls a bit for awhile after that. "All I Wanna Do is Make Love to You" from Brigade is about as bad as Starship's "We Built This City" in my book. But it is nice to see them in their later years heralded as elder queens of rock, with recognition as the trailblazers they were back in the 70s.

 

Agree with Archtop above, the departure of the Fishers' pretty much is the boundary, the band was never the same without them. That said, it's hard to say they could have lasted into the eighties any other way than the way they did. Regardless, the material from the seventies travels well through time, the eighties material, for me, doesn't at all.

 

This is a good source for information over their career. Quite a good read.

 

You could say they had a change of Heart...