Heart’s Ann Wilson will pay tribute to David Bowie, Tom Petty, and others on her new covers album, Immortal.

Heart frontwoman Ann Wilson is a rock ’n’ roll survivor. And sadly, that means she has outlived many of her rock ’n’ roll peers. “I was just on the planet like everybody else, watching all these people decide to leave for one reason or another — all these great artists just all departing within the last several years,” she sighs, discussing late greats like Tom Petty, Leonard Cohen, George Michael, and fellow Pacific Northwest rock legend Chris Cornell.

But Wilson decided to find a way to pay homage to these recently departed artists, with Immortal, a new solo album of classic covers. “I didn’t think of it as much as a covers album, as I think of it as a way for me to honor the expressions they left,” she says. “It’s not that sad of a thing, because the music lives.”

Among the album’s highlights are Michael’s “A Different Corner,” Petty’s “Luna” (which features guitar playing by Warren Haynes of the Allman Brothers/Gov’t Mule), and Cohen’s “A Thousand Kisses Deep.” But two tracks seem especially topical and remake-ready in 2018: David Bowie’s “I’m Afraid of Americans” and Lesley Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me.”

“I decided to do [‘I’m Afraid of Americans’] because it’s so relevant for right now,” Wilson explains. “I liked taking the position of looking at Americans from a longer viewpoint. He was a Brit looking at Americans — and it’s not hateful toward Americans, it’s just sort of a whimsical thing. It says some real true things. And what I tried to do with the song was make the production full of sounds and feelings from other countries, so the message about America is put into the perspective of the rest of the world.”

Gore’s 1963 hit, which has been covered in the past by Joan Jett and Grace with G-Eazy, is another song that’s taken on new relevance in the current political climate. “‘You Don’t Own Me’ first came out at a time when Lesley Gore was only a teenager. … It was a really bold move for a teenage girl to stand up and face her boyfriend and say, ‘Hey, I don’t belong to you,’” Wilson points out. “That was a huge move back then, and it just grew and grew into what they now call a feminist anthem.

“But when I do it, I think it’s more about respect,” she says. “It could be about anybody. It’s for anybody now. The song has really become a lot more universal than just a feminist anthem. It is one, but it goes a lot farther than that. And that’s why I chose it, because in this era of people standing up for their choice of who they are, they can marry who they want. They can say, ‘Me too.’ They just should have respect, and they can proclaim it.”

Wilson tears into “You Don’t Own Me” with all of the vitriol and vinegar she oozed on one of Heart’s first hits, the scree “Barracuda,” recorded to protest a misogynistic publicity stunt by Heart’s label, Mushroom Records, which had spread a gross rumor that Ann and her sister/bandmate, Nancy, were lovers. “When that was written, it was definitely a ‘Screw you!’ It was written in anger, because somebody disrespected me, and it pissed me off. But now it’s really gratifying to see other people take ‘Barracuda’ into their lives as being like, ‘Yeah, me too.’ Men and women.”

Immortal is obviously an emotional listen from start to finish (other artists honored include Amy Winehouse, Glenn Frey, Cream’s Jack Bruce, and Gerry Rafferty), but the toughest track for Wilson had to be “I Am the Highway,” by Cornell’s supergroup Audioslave. Wilson and Cornell were friends, and on the day he died last year, she passionately performed his Soundgarden classic “Black Hole Sun” on Jimmy Kimmel Live. This year, she and Alice in Chains’ Jerry Cantrell also honored Cornell at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony.

“Chris was, in my opinion, one of the best singers ever, best rock singers ever,” she says. “He just had so much range. He was so passionate. He could be so tender, but he also had this great, powerful, fiery, masculine voice. He just could do it all. He was a complicated person. So many singers get caught up and pulled down by their complications, and unfortunately he was one of them. I just think that it was an honor for me to get to sing his songs. And now that I’m singing [‘I Am the Highway’] and I kind of got inside it, I just think of him so much, you know? I just remember what he was like.”

Immortal is ultimately nostalgic in a happy way, however, not just because it celebrates so many wonderful artists’ legacies, but also because it reunites Wilson with producer Mike Flicker, who discovered Heart in 1975 and went on to sign them and work on their first few albums. “He just came down and heard Heart when it was a bar band in Vancouver, B.C., and he was the first one to say, ‘I gotta get these guys on tape.’ It was a tape back then,” Wilson chuckles.

Having been in the business for more than 40 years and seeing so many changes in the rock landscape — and seeing so many rock stars pass away — Wilson is often asked the question if, no pun intended, “rock is dead.” And she always scoffs, especially when reflecting on the timelessness of the music covered on the aptly titled Immortal.

“You know, I’ve been in rock bands since 1971. And from the very beginning back then, people were going, ‘Oh, rock is dead. Now it’s going to be disco. Now it’s going to be this, now it’s going to be something else,’” she shrugs. “And rock always percolates along underneath. On a certain level, it lives. It’s not always the biggest commercial success; it isn’t always riding in the top five of the Billboard charts or whatever. But it’s definitely a genre that has its own life and doesn’t just go away. … I think rock is a life force.”

Audio of this conversation originally aired on SiriusXM Volume, channel 106.

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Entertainment.

“Heart’s always been sort of like a cockroach. You can set off a bomb, and it’ll still be alive underneath.”

So says Ann Wilson, the legendary rock goddess who founded Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductees Heart with her guitarist sister, Nancy Wilson, 40 years ago. But now Ann is hitting the road alone, and she tells Yahoo Music, “We have no plans right now with Heart. We’re on creative walkabout. We’re both doing solo things this year… We need to let it breathe. We haven’t made any plans one way or the other.”

Ann is closed-lipped about discussing the specific, scandalous circumstances that led to Heart’s indefinite hiatus, but the details of the Wilsons’ recent family drama have been well publicized. During Heart’s tour last summer with Joan Jett and Cheap Trick, at a stop in the sisters’ home state of Washington, Ann’s husband, Dean Wetter, got into a violent altercation on the band’s bus with Nancy’s teenage twin sons. Wetter was charged with two counts of assault (one felony and one misdemeanor), and in March of this year he pleaded guilty to two non-felony assault charges in the fourth degree and was sentenced to two years’ unsupervised probation, individual counseling, group therapy, a ban on any alcohol or drugs, $3,000 restitution, and no contact with Nancy’s twins. At the time, Heart’s tour continued through October 2016, but backstage relations were understandably strained, and once the tour wrapped, the Wilson sisters went their separate ways.

While Ann’s “cockroach” comment implies that one day, Heart will rock again, for now the singer would rather focus on repairing her relationship with her sister, rather than repairing their band. “What Nancy and I are doing right now is we’re working on our friendship and on our sisterhood,” Ann tells Yahoo Music. “The band, that’s something else again. That’ll come and go and evolve and shape. But we’ll be sisters long after everything else is gone. So we’re working on our own relationship right now… Talking, letting water run under the bridge. Just cool down. Everybody chill.”

For now, Ann, who is 66 years old, is enjoying her creative time alone and making the most of it. “We’ve been sort of giving everything to [Heart] since we were in our early 20s,” she says. “That’s been the main focus of our lives. This is the first time we’ve decided to actually look away from it for a couple of minutes… I think that when and if Heart comes back together, in whatever form it comes back together in, it’ll be fresher.”

But, she adds, “it’s never going to be like it was before… We’re both individuals, with each other and without each other, so that’s a really cool thing.”

On her current solo tour, Ann is “maintaining that it’s not a Heart show,” playing only a few Heart tunes — “Alone,” “What About Love,” “Barracuda,” and “A Million Miles” — along with new originals and covers of songs by the Black Crowes, Peter Gabriel, and the Who. “So far I haven’t had anyone scream out ‘Magic Man’ or anything,” she insists with a laugh.

“Barracuda” is an obvious choice for Ann’s set. True, the song did take on an unwanted new life during the 2008 Republican National Convention, as the theme music for vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, aka “Sarah Barracuda” — resulting in the Wilson sisters sending a cease-and-desist letter to John McCain’s presidential campaign. (“It was like, gag me,” Ann grumbles now.) But Ann says the anthem — which was written to protest a misogynist publicity stunt by Heart’s 1970s label, Mushroom Records (the company spread a titillating rumor that she and Nancy were lovers) — has “stood the test of time for being a scree against something really sleazy and inauthentic, anti-equality. It’s always been the same. Now [music business sexism] is just out in the open more. It’s out in the sun now.”

As for whether it’s easier for female musicians now than it was when Heart first angrily recorded “Barracuda,” Ann says, “I for sure think the industry is more accepting of women now, different kinds of artists. Back when I started, you could either be a folk singer or you could be a disco diva, or you could be a secretary or maybe a disc jockey, but there was no room for anything alternative yet. There was also, I guess, a written rule at radio that you could only play one woman per hour… So if Joan Baez had a hit out, for instance, you were just out of luck until next hour. Or Donna Summer or something. So, yeah, things have changed an awful lot since then, but I think the basic things — some of the basic, most misogynistic things — have not changed.”

It’s interesting that Ann has chosen to sing 1985’s “What About Love” and 1987′s “Alone” on her solo tour, rather than, say, the aforementioned “Magic Man.” After all, Heart continued to struggle with the industry in the bittersweet ’80s — which was their most commercially fruitful period, but a time when they felt they had surrendered creative control in order to achieve mainstream success — and they have distanced themselves from their ’80s output in recent interviews.

“We had hit another crossroads where the music we came up with ourselves in the late ’70s and super-early ’80s was no longer being accepted by our record company,” Ann recalls. “They were just like, ‘No. That’s old stuff. This is what’s being played on the radio.’ So we had to choose whether we wanted our career to peter out, or we could play some songs written by other people that were radio-friendly. We chose to be on the radio at that time, and be on MTV and all that, and take that ride, and wear the clothes and the big hair and all that.

“I’ve never known another time where there’s been a lower premium set on female naturalness,” Ann continues with a chuckle, remembering Heart’s garish neon music videos of the era. “It was just so completely fake and phony, and that was the whole point of it… It was stilettos, shiny stretchy pants, corsets, fake nails, fake hair, fake lashes, everything fake… I remember what a pain it was to get into those outfits, especially when you took them away from the video set and out onto the live stage in the heat and stuff! Incredible costuming challenges.”

Heart survived and thrived after the ’80s (until recently, of course) by, Ann says, eventually staying true to themselves and “not jumping on trends. I think that’s what will be a suicide for a long career, is if you start going, ‘Well, hey, I’m going to wear a miniskirt this year, so that means I have to get leg implants to make them look good enough.’”

And speaking of body issues, Ann, a woman in entertainment whose fluctuating weight has been under scrutiny by the media and trolls for decades, still rues the fact that “to be a superstar, as a woman in rock, you have to be model-beautiful,” and she gets heated discussing the crazy body-shaming that Lady Gaga received after her Super Bowl performance this year. (“That drove me so crazy, I couldn’t even really look at it. I was just like, ‘Don’t even.’ Because she has so much more to offer than her physical self. She’s got ideas, she’s got an incredible voice, can write songs, can play, can dance, believes in a nonbullying world, in a forgiving world, and puts her weight behind it.”) However, she’s encouraged by the current body-positivity movement, saying, “That’s how acceptance starts, is by people just going, ‘No, we’re not going to do that. We’re going to just let women be natural and have that be OK.’ But that is a salmon-swimming-upstream ideal.”

It’s unclear what the future is for “women in rock” — or rock musicians in general, since rock ’n’ roll has been declared “dead” for years now, and the charts are dominated by pop and urban artists. But Ann, who cites Muse as her favorite current rock act, isn’t worried. Thirty years after Heart’s 1980s heyday, and roughly a year after breaking away from the group that made her famous, she doesn’t mind being outside the mainstream anymore.

“Rock evolved out of rebellion, so when you turn on the Billboard Awards or something like the Grammys and there’s no rock on there, that’s a good sign — because that means that rock is not welcome inside of a pop format. That’s where [rock] belongs, is outside of a pop format,” Ann explains. “[Rock is] a little rebellious, a little bitter pill for the pop world to swallow. It’s supposed to be anti. It’s supposed to be small and vital and hot-blooded.”

As for the future of Heart, Ann shrugs. “What’s important to me is love, especially that. What’s important to me is growing and evolving. But ultimately, what’s important to me is being real and being authentic. I’ve spent enough time in my life holding poses, playing roles… I think coming up with new songs that are real and relevant to this moment is what I’m about.”

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This article originally ran on Yahoo Music.