Ann Wilson Has ‘Pages and Pages’ of New Music

Ann Wilson has “pages and pages” of new musical ideas which helped fuel her latest album with Tripsitter, Consecrated Ground, which arrived Oct. 9.

Her whole journey, both working on the record — and separately, the documentary, In My Voice, has been an informative one.

For example — we all know that Wilson has one of the most powerful voices in rock and roll. So you can imagine her surprise when the legendary Heart vocalist heard herself being characterized as someone who is a quiet person.

That was one personal revelation that came about as a result of In My Voice, which had its initial screenings earlier this year as part of a special nationwide tour. It will get a wider release on Nov. 25.

“One thing that was a pretty common thread of what all the people said was, ‘Oh she’s so quiet, you know, she’s just really internal,'” Wilson tells UCR in a rare and exclusive interview to discuss Consecrated Ground. “‘She doesn’t really talk much and then when she sings, it just explodes out of her.'”

 ‘There’s So Much Noise Out There You That Have To Weed Through’

“I think most of them thought, ‘Wow, what a weird, ironic thing that is. Somebody who just likes to watch and listen and then when they go out and do it, they really open up,'” she continues. “You know, I wasn’t aware that was a real thing of mine. I just kind of go through life with eyes and ears open.”

“I listen to a lot of stuff that people say — and a lot of people that can’t stop talking,” she points out. “There’s so much noise out there that you have to weed through.”

Having spoken with Wilson a number of times over the years, it’s easy to see how people would have that perception, which can feel true in a certain sense. On the phone — and in more recent times, via Zoom, she has a quiet demeanor and at least initially, a tone of reservation. It’s all connected to an element of trust which can build up as the conversation progresses, depending on who she’s speaking with and the line of questioning.

What I’ve always respected about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame legend is that each question is carefully considered and thoughtfully answered. She takes time getting her thoughts out, punctuating certain moments with a laugh that can change in tone, based on the subject at hand. Sometimes, it’s just ruefully honest, in a way that quickly reminds you that you’re talking to a fellow human who wakes up each day in the same way that you do and faces many similar challenges.

The Observational Spirit That Drives Her Creativity

But as a fellow creative person, another element of Wilson I’ve always appreciated is her observational spirit. Moments of our conversation in late September reminded me of a prior encounter more than a decade earlier in the summer of 2011, when Heart was out touring with Def Leppard. An unexpected break in the tour left the band members with free time. What she did with hers was really interesting and further colorizes who she is as a person.

“We’ve been traveling constantly and all kinds of things have happened, good and bad. We’re always writers, but right now, there’s really a lot of stuff that’s going down on paper from our experience here, just out in the country,” she told me then. “There’s one song that just was banging around inside my head after we were in Pennsylvania. And I’ve never seen the Northeast quite so beat down, quite so poor and broke. The Rust Belt speaks really loudly about what’s going on in the economy.”

“When we went on the break, like, everyone flew home, but I said, ‘No, I’m going to take my bus and I’m just going to go back across the country to L.A. And I’m going to write on the trip,'” she explained. “I didn’t know how haunted I was by the economic situation back east and how it affects the people. I wrote all of this stuff on the trip back and when we were going through Nebraska, going down through New Mexico and stuff, the big empty out there, it just spoke really loudly to me.”

Fifteen years later, Wilson is in the midst of a similarly ongoing and incredible creative burst, in large part because of her alliance with Tripsitter. Consecrated Ground is her fourth studio album since 2018.

The roots of her collaboration with the group that fans would come to know as Tripsitter began in part with 2022’s Fierce Bliss, further locking in as the union solidified with the Another Door album the following year.

Guitarist Ryan Wariner, multi-instrumentalist Paul Moak, bassist Tony Lucido and drummer Sean T. Lane (who has since been replaced by drummer Sarah Tomek) formed the instrumental core of Tripsitter. It proved to be a potent blend with Wilson.

So much so that when Heart regrouped in 2023 in preparation for their subsequent Royal Flush tour, Ann and Nancy Wilson and guitarist Ryan Waters (who had been playing with Nancy in her band, Roadcase Royale) were joined by Wariner, Moak, Lucido and Lane. The reconstituted classic rockers subsequently performed more than 100 concerts together between 2024 and 2026.

‘I Have Pages and Pages of Stuff’

Consecrated Ground offers audible proof of how much the chemistry between Wilson and Tripsitter has really found its footing as a result of that extensive live work.

As the vocalist shared during our interview, she’s also found focus through their method of collaboration in a way that is inspiring. It can feel effortless at times, as the ideas begin to show up and take shape.

“We just get together and they jam and I write,” she explains. “I’m sitting out in a little connecting room where I can hear them and I just listen to them. I just let it wash over me, and for Consecrated Ground, that worked really well. I have pages and pages of stuff that I wrote while they were jamming. Not all of it works, but some of it does, really well. It just fits like a puzzle.”

How Wilson Embraced a New Kind of ‘Chaos’ With Her Songwriting

“Reverse Chaos” is one of the songs from Consecrated Ground that she highlights as something that was “a little bit harder” to see the final outcome of where it was heading. It felt like something that was outside of her wheelhouse, in comparison to the kind of material she usually writes.

Wilson would discover a path forward and it was one which helped to inspire the title of the song. “I just thought, ‘Well, let’s take these these lyrics and. write them in couplets and have each couplet be be in opposition,’ like each line is the opposite of the next,” she remembers. “And so I wrote the whole thing that way, and yeah, it was chaotic. It was reverse chaotic.”

There’s a tribal vibe to the sound of “Me and Comanche,” which fits well with the spirit of where the song itself came from. As Wilson shared with fans during a recent performance in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, it’s “kind of a true story,” though perhaps romanticized a bit. In writing it, she took inspiration from things both past and present, close to home and far away.

Listen to Ann Wilson and Tripsitter’s ‘Me and Comanche’

“Five generations ago, in Germany, there were two brothers,” she told the attentive audience at the Wind Creek Event Center. “Five generations ago, in Texas, there were two Comanche sisters. What happened was the brothers and sisters got together and got married. They all moved up to Idaho [and] went on over to Washington State.”

“Many generations later, what was left of that original bloodline, bore a beautiful baby boy,” Wilson added, chuckling, as she shifted to a revealing moment. “And well, I married him. He’s got a wide streak of Comanche in him. It’s many generations diluted, but you could tell.”

“It’s very, very good,” she shared, regarding her ongoing relationship with her husband, Dean Wetter, who she married in 2015, decades after the pair first met briefly and went on a date in the ’80s.

READ MORE: Ann Wilson Gets Married

Consecrated Ground also takes stock of the health issues that Wilson has weathered in recent years. In May of 2024, Heart was forced to cancel European tour dates so she could recover from a “time-sensitive but routine medical procedure.”

By July of that same year, they’d postponed the remaining concerts on the schedule. “I underwent an operation to remove something that, as it turns out, was cancerous,” the singer shared at that time. “The operation was successful and I’m feeling great but my doctors are now advising me to undergo a course of preventive chemotherapy and I’ve decided to do it.”

Five days before Heart was to return to the road in the early part of 2025, Wilson had another setback, with a fall that left her with an injured elbow, “pinned back together with screws” in three places. While others might have canceled concerts, she decided to carry on, sitting down to perform with the members of Heart. It was a series of gigs which demonstrated that while she had been perhaps down and faced many a challenge in the preceding years and months, she was not out.

Ann’s Health: ‘I Feel Really Good’

Thankfully, things are in a better place now here in the fall of 2026. “I don’t have to tell you that life is not all smooth, beautiful, perfect, and wonderful. Sometimes things happen. There are bumps in the road. Sometimes they’re big. Sometimes they’re just little blips, but I had a big one,” Wilson detailed during the Oct. 2 concert with Tripsitter in Bethlehem.

“About three years ago, I went to the doctor for a routine physical and they found the worst…they found cancer,” she detailed. “It was not very much fun, and it was pretty hard. It took a while. It took a lot of agony, but I’m getting it all back now, and I feel really good.”

“The treatment was kind of worse than the actual thing. I thought the chemo and the radiation [would be the hardest part], the songwriter said. “One of the worst side effects, I thought, was the aching in the bones. [It was] just constant [and] nothing would stop it. Nothing would resolve it. You just had to ride it out.”

She documented that part of her experience in the appropriately titled “Bone Pain,” a dark and atmospheric highlight that arrives as the second song on Consecrated Ground. It at least offered some sort of resolution, creatively, at a moment when it didn’t feel like she could find that physically.

Songwriting: ‘I Always Write From the Inside Out’

It’s one of a number of songs on the new album that highlight the vulnerability within Wilson’s approach to her chosen craft. That has long been a crucial element, something which often makes them personally identifiable to the people who hear them and form their own attachments and meanings with the words within.

“I think a lot of a lot of people go at it from the outside looking in, looking at themselves, and I can’t do that,” she tells UCR. “I always write from the inside out, and whether that means that’s the iconic way of sounding like me, I can’t stop. I can’t help that. But [with] some people, it’s so obvious, because they’re writing songs to sound like themselves. You know, that’s a weird through the looking glass thing.”

Occasionally, Things Come Full Circle.

That was her experience, which led to “Renaissance Kids,” another standout on Consecrated Ground. Listening to it, you get the impression that it could be about Wilson and her past. But if we think back to that 2011 trip that Wilson took on her bus across the country as she was on that unexpected break from Heart’s tour with Def Leppard, “Renaissance Kids” is actually another example of her observational spirit at work.

“When I first moved to Nashville, there are all these younger people there that, they’re seekers, young seekers,” she explains. “They have these get-togethers where they go to each other’s houses and sit on the floor. They love to read poetry and get all literary and heavy and into the phases of the moon.

“It’s very cool to watch them discover all this stuff that my generation discovered back, like, maybe in the ’70s, all these same metaphysical things,”

It’s interesting, we suggest, to see the things that are familiar, that Wilson herself experienced, that have carried through the years.

“Yeah, [that’s] right. And there’s that part in the song that says everything is new again,” she points out. “That’s hitting that nail on the head. You know, hey, this. I recognize this. I did this like 30 years ago.”

“But I’ll never be one to look down my nose at people who are just starting out because they have to do that,” Wilson continues. “They have to wake up one day and go, ‘Hey, you know, this is what the world is,’ and cry and laugh and do all that stuff and and get together and sit on the floor and be metaphysical.”

Listen to Ann Wilson and Tripsitter’s ‘Renaissance Kids’

What Comes Back Through All of It

If you stick around long enough, as they say, you’ll perhaps get to see or at least have time to consider the impact that your work has had, both with your peers and those who perhaps came along a bit later.

For the past decade, Ann has been covering the Black Crowes‘ “She Talks to Angels” in her live set. It’s something which means a lot to Crowes guitarist Rich Robinson.

“It’s really humbling to see people love what you do, cover it and bring their own thing to it,” he tells UCR in a separate interview. “It’s one of those things that you don’t think about when you’re a teenager or when you write these songs.”

“Living with that song for 40 years — you know I was 17 when I wrote it,” he adds. “So I never once in a million years thought anyone would even hear would hear [that] song.”

“She does this amazing cover,” he says. “One of the first tours we ever did was opening for Heart, too. Ann was really cool. She was very gracious, and like, we were kind of snotty little kids, but she was always such a sweetheart — and her voice is stunning.”

Watch Ann Wilson Perform ‘She Talks to Angels’

Chappell Roan and Lucy Dacus got to share how they’d been affected, directly, with the singer, during a conversation backstage in 2025, recorded for her podcast, After Dinner Thinks With Ann Wilson.

“Nothing has ever made me feel as powerful as when I sang ‘Barracuda’ on stage at Austin City Limits [in 2024],” Roan told Wilson regarding the Heart classic, which she’s kept in her set since then. “I was like, actually, this is the coolest song ever, and I feel like a real rock star.”

READ MORE: Top 10 Heart Songs

“It’s a whole different thing,” Wilson noted, as the three women acknowledged the differences between the genres of rock and pop.

“Pop is so fun…but rock is a different beast that I never really embodied before,” Roan explained. “So I was like, ‘Let me channel ‘Barracuda.'”

“Yeah, and a song like that and others I can think of, you can’t hold it in like that,” Wilson expressed. “It has to be kind of like an independence of the soul, where you just let it go, and you just go, what the f–k, you know?”

Listen to Ann’s Conversation With Chappell Roan and Lucy Dacus

The conversations Wilson has on After Dinner Thinks spool out naturally. She and friend Criss Cain discuss “work life, home life, the universe, movies, politics, music, dogs, magic… and anything in between,” as the description for their show says.

Working on ‘In My Voice’ Was ‘Quite an Experience’

The flip side of that can be found in the In My Voice documentary, which she says started to come together when they were about three-quarters of the way finished with the album that became Consecrated Ground.

She took the film on tour in May and June to share it with audiences in 10 cities across the United States, including an evening in Cleveland at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Wilson and director Barbara Hall were there each night to discuss In My Voice after the screenings.

“If you’ve ever had a documentary made about you, it’s quite an experience because suddenly there are all these people that you really admire and respect, and they’re saying good things about you,” she says.

One thing that she was conscious of was that she didn’t want the film to be “a whitewash” like some she’d seen in the past. “I wanted it to tell the story,” Wilson explains during the interview with UCR. “Nancy and I had a book about Heart [2012’s Kicking and Dreaming: A Story of Heart, Soul and Rock and Roll] that came out some years ago.”

“A lot of stuff was left out of the book, because we all had young children,” she tells us. “It would have been a little bit much for them to listen to the tales of their mothers doing cocaine and stuff back in the bad old days. So that was more of a…it just told the story of the life of the band.”

“But [In My Voice] is more of a real picture of what my life has been like,” she shares. “Like it says in [the film], I asked Nancy to participate and just speak, you know, but she didn’t want to. She really wanted to wait for the Heart documentary [and] that’s okay.”

Watch a Preview of ‘In My Voice’

What’s Next For Ann in 2027

There’s been a lot going on in the Heart universe, including the band’s documentary, a separate biopic that’s long been in the works and a new album from the band that both Wilson sisters are excited about.

All signs are pointing to a busy 2027 on a number of levels, something which Ann, even taking a reserved approach with her comments, is happy to confirm.

“Oh God, you know that [the new album] is something that I’ve taken a vow not to say anything about,” she says. “It’s the biggest secrecy, ever. But I can say that it’s done, and it’ll be out next year.”

“It’s fantastic, by the way,” she allows.

The ‘Huge Portal’ That Changed Everything

Ann Wilson is now 50 years past the moment when she and the members of Heart released their debut album, 1975’s Dreamboat Annie. She recognizes what a milestone moment it was.

“That was a big portal for us, that time in Vancouver, where we went into a studio — never having been in one before — like a real studio, making a demo,” she remembers. “That was a huge portal. Like you walk through, and you come out the other side [as] something else, kind of. Same people, but just transformed, in a way.”

READ MORE: When Heart Finally Landed in the U.S. With ‘Dreamboat Annie’

“I always remember getting in the car and going to the studio the first time and then going back home in the car after the session and just being all jangled,” she continues. “My nerves were all jangled and I was just like, “What? What? What? This is really something different. This is something we have to crawl through and come out the other side. Which we did.”

As one of those original renaissance kids, it’s inspiring that Wilson is continuing to explore and find new musical portals, as she has with Consecrated Ground. Songs like album opener “I Will Not Be Coming Back” and “Hard Fought” offer proof that although the events of recent years have tested her endurance and resolve, she has come out the other side. She’s still driven by the same thing that drove her back then — the music.

Wilson is understandably proud of what she’s built with Tripsitter, too. The name came along later after they formed their bond. “They were just a bunch of a bunch of players around Nashville, and we started hanging out. And pretty soon, we couldn’t get away from each other,” she explains.”We liked each other so much, and so many ideas came so easily with them. So here we are, three albums along.”

Hearing Consecrated Ground and the spirit and energy in Wilson’s voice, it’s clear that she remains just as dedicated to her chosen cause. That was also crystal-clear when we spoke with her in 2022 as she was starting a new chapter, now her current journey.

“The idea of retirement is nowhere in my comprehension. I don’t know what I’d do, because I’ve been doing music since I was, like, 14 years old,” she told us then. “So it’s a calling with me more than a job that you retire from and then move to Margaritaville. I’m just not made like that.”

Ann Wilson and Tripsitter’s Consecrated Ground is available now. Visit Ann’s official website for tour dates and additional information.

Listen to Ann Wilson and Tripsitter’s ‘I Will Not Be Coming Back’