Why Heart’s Biggest Hit ‘Never Felt Like a Heart Song’

Heart scored a bevy of hits in the ‘80s, yet Nancy Wilson believes one of their biggest successes “never felt like a Heart song.”

During the ‘80s, Heart was routinely working with outside writers. The process yielded strong results, but it was also tedious.

“We gave a lot of songs a good try,” Wilson noted during an appearance on the Broken Record podcast, recalling how she’d spend hours listening to demo cassettes. “There were some real turkeys. A lot of really bombastic ballads… You know, like a bunch of very righteous sounding marching songs. Either marching rock songs or bombastic ballads with a lot of gated echo on the snare drum.”

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One song that Heart opted to record was "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You,” a tune penned by songwriter and producer Mutt Lange. Its lyrics chronicled a woman who picks up a hitchhiker and has sex with him in order to get pregnant. The song became the lead single from Heart’s 1990 album, Brigade, and topped charts around the world. Despite acknowledging it was their "biggest global hit," Wilson claims the song never quite fit her band.

“The formulaic stuff is what we never could get right,” the guitarist explained. “That's just the one that just never felt like a Heart song exactly. It's a great track. It sounds genius on the radio, but it was never for Ann as a lead singer too, who has to sell what she's talking about in those lyrics of the song. It's really kind of more like a country story song. It's more like that. It's not a real rock song per se.”

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Still, Wilson did concede that there was one aspect of "All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” that she was proud of.

“It was banned in Ireland, you know, because of the reverse sexism of it,” she noted. “We were kind of proud of the fact that it was banned in Ireland.”

Ann Wilson Never Liked ‘All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You’

Like Nancy, Ann Wilson wasn’t a fan of “All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You” either.

“Essentially, in songs that I don’t write, I become a storyteller," the singer explained in a 2017 interview. "And I think I’m at my best as a storyteller when I can dig what’s being said. I didn’t believe in the way the original lyrics were devaluing the man in the story. Just going, ‘Yeah, I can pick you up. We can have a night of love. We can never even know each other’s names. You can be so miraculous, and then I can just get up and leave you a note and walk out on you. Have a baby and sort of gloat about your surprise when you see the kid.’ To me, that was kind of an empty, weird, sort of hateful story.”

Watch Heart's 'All I Wanna Do Is Make Love to You' Video