My Career in Five Songs

NANCY WILSON WAS all of nine years old when she first saw the Beatles on TV. She remembers it as her “call to Mecca moment.” “That was it for me,” she says. “What the Beatles were doing was so mind blowing, it just went right through me. I immediately set my sights on learning the guitar.” Her sister Ann was similarly besotted, and after much begging of their parents, the Wilson girls were rewarded with a $30 Lyle acoustic, which Nancy remembers as being nearly impossible to play. “You could not form a barred F chord on it to save your life,” she says. “It was such a struggle. A little later, Ann got sick and our grandmother gave her a much better guitar. I would sneak off and play it, which made Ann furious. But I could actually play that one.”

After college, Nancy joined Ann, now a lead singer, in the band that would become Heart. At their early gigs, she would hear a certain phrase: “Pretty good for a girl.” “It was as if people