Heart By Heart Offers Concord A Trip Back In Time Saturday

CONCORD, NH — Anyone who is over the age of 50 can recall the time when Heart, the rock band fronted by sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson, disappeared and, seemingly overnight, reinvented themselves.

Despite dozens of hit singles and deep tracks from albums played on FM radio constantly, there was about a 48-month period between 1983 and 1985 where the band essentially vanished. During that time, there was a seismic shift in the music business, too. The advent of MTV and its expansion into nearly every home in America led the band to reinvent themselves musically and visually in videos to sell records and appeal to the hairband metal crowd. Gone was the gritty rough and tumble band replaced by glittery pop stars with slick session players.

While the songs were still great, and the band sold even more records than before, they were different and it was noticeable — probably because more than half the original band was gone.

If you have wondered all these decades what happened to some of the old band members or you long for the old days and the older sound, you have a chance to re-experience it on Saturday.

Steve Fossen, the band’s original bassist, along with Michael Derosier, a long-time drummer with the band, will perform all of their hits as Heart By Heart for the first time in Concord at the Capitol Center for the Arts. Somar Macek, Fossen’s wife, fronts the group while guitarist, keyboardist, and vocalist Lizzy Daymont, and guitarist Chad Quist round out the band.

Fossen said the history of the band is a bit more complicated than what some people may think or know. Derosier and Nancy Wilson were an item at the time. And when their relationship ended, it became difficult to continue. There were also musical differences and directions, too.

“Ann and Nancy do not like people telling them what to do,” Fossen said, who founded Heart in 1967, before the sisters joined the band. “But that is a typical thing that happens with a lot of bands … there are tensions along the way; there is a push and pull of” performing and writing songs.

It is all water under the bridge now — Fossen and others were at a recent Ann Wilson show in Seattle and she acknowledged them from the stage and hung out, too, backstage after. And there are no issues either with Fossen and Derosier performing with their own band, playing songs they wrote or co-wrote, to sound exactly how fans remember them to be. They co-own many of the songs and still earn residuals, he said.

Over the years, Fossen said, he and others had noticed how Ann and Nancy Wilson had changed the way some of the old songs sounded, to the disappointment of some fans. This led to the formation of Heart by Heart and the collection of the current musicians who learned all of the parts and play them exactly how they were written and recorded.

“We were really conscious of this,” he said. “When I go to see REO Speedwagon or Deep Purple, I want to see them play the songs as we remember them.”

Who wants to hear “Smoke on the Water,” which turns 50 next year, as an acoustic number, as an example, Fossen said. He added, Heart By Heart was, essentially, a garage band since they play in a garage and really focus on the sound and performance going on in the room — just like the old days. Heart, when it first started, was a bar band, Fossen said, playing Wednesday to Saturday, “honing our craft until we got the confidence to play those bigger concerts.” Ann and Nancy Wilson were never personalities at the time, he said and were not that sexy either.

“We did try to dress nice,” he said.

The band, Fossen said, was “a band,” and the songs and presence “evolved very organically,” first, with performance, and then, songwriting. The “artistic quality” emerged during the course of three or four years — from “Magic Man” in 1975, to “Crazy On You,” “Barracuda,” “Little Queen,” “Heartless,” and “Straight On.”

While he said there were a lot of “very brilliant songwriters” today, the process seems to be a bit different — with a lot of the musicians practicing by themselves and then, getting other musicians to interpret what they want versus slugging it out on the club scene. Heart, he said, was able to bring it together like the luminaries they were fans of at the time, including Crosby Stills and Nash, the Beatles, and Rolling Stones.

During soundchecks, Fossen said, the band tries to reimagine what was done in the past; a lot of bands have big heavy bass drum and snare, right away, upfront, he said. Their mixes, instead, focus on the songs and making sure fans hear the songs as close as possible as they were in the past.

“In our band,” he said, “we make sure all the instruments are balanced.”

Heart By Heart does continue to write new material, Fossen said, but the band is strictly performing songs people know and love. During the show, the band will mix it up a bit — they perform all of “Magic Man,” nearly 6 minutes, not the trimmed down version; they will also perform a medley of other fan favorites, at least a minute and a half or so of each, to make sure all of the songs get into the set — a trick he learned from Burt Bachrach who just had too many songs to perform in one set.

But it is not all about nostalgia. Heart By Heart use downloads and streaming data to influence the setlist. Fossen said, “We cleverly put the set together … so that fans get the entire experience (and) don’t feel slighted.”

There is both fear and excitement, too, when coming to a new city to perform, he said. There have been a few gigs where the band members can see skepticism in the eyes of some fans during the first couple of songs. The fans do not see the Wilson sisters. But, by the second or the third song, the audience seems to say, “‘These guys know what they are doing …’ and we do,” Fossen said. “We play the double lead guitar solos and the acoustic guitar parts … it’s an experience you will have to see to believe. It’s really fun.”

To purchase tickets to Saturday’s show, visit the Capitol Center for the Arts website, linked here.

For more information about the band, visit the Heart by Heart website.

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