Day 179: Heart – Little Queen

I’ve spent a good few hours revamping my masterlist today, so I’m giving myself the gift of a short write-up. I’ve reorganised it from being 10, 9-9.5, 8-8.5 etc. to the more straightforward structure of 10, 9.5, 9, 8.5, 8, etc. I also changed the order so that the older ones are on the bottom so that you’re less likely to click on early stuff with the crappier writing. Not that I’ve improved massively in the course of the project, but still.

Album cover courtesy of Sony Music Entertainment

Today is another artist who I’ve covered before (so that I don’t have to write the background info) and I decided to go for a group that was so good that I wrote “I’m about to listen to everything they’ve ever made,” and then I proceeded not to do that. It’s time. I’m going for Heart’s 1977 release, Little Queen.

Heart had issues with their label after they decided to take out a full-page ad in Rolling Stone to celebrate that they sold a million copies of Dreamboat Annie, which sounds like a nice gesture, but they did it by making a fake tabloid cover where Ann and Nancy Wilson look naked that said “Heart’s Wilson sisters confess: ‘It was only our first time!'” They managed to get out of their contract, sort of, but the label insisted on them releasing another album, which they put out one month before the release of Little Queen.

The opener of Little Queen kind of refers to something related to their dispute: a radio promoter had approached Ann Wilson making a joke that she’s in an incestuous relationship with her sister, so she went back to her hotel room seething with rage and wrote the now-iconic diss track “Barracuda”.

That song is a hard act to follow, but the rest of the album does manage to keep up. However, I’m not as enamoured by this as I was with Dreamboat Annie. It’s still a good collection of ‘70s hard rock songs, but it lacks a little bit of the magic that their first album had. The Zeppelin influences are still loud and clear, especially on “Dream of the Archer”, and the guitars on the album are incredible, but something about it just seems disjointed.

This is a frustrating one to write about because I feel like it’s missing something, but I just can’t seem to point my finger at what that is. All the building blocks are there, but something about it just doesn’t get me all the way there. It’s still a decent album, though, but falls short of its potential. I’m giving it an 8.5/10.