December 14, 2013

Publication title: The Gazette, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Vancouver
Writer: Francois Marchand

Review: Heart is home for the holidays in Vancouver

Classic rock band hands out holiday treat with Sarah McLachlan and friends.

Heart and Friends: Home For The Holidays

With Sarah McLachlan, Shawn Colvin, Ben Mink

VANCOUVER — Home for the holidays. Has a nice ring to it.

For rock band Heart, mainly Ann and Nancy Wilson, spending an evening in Vancouver to celebrate the festive season and calling it a “homecoming” is pretty much a given.

Need we re-state the Seattle-bred sisters’ eternal bond to VanCity, coming out of obscurity schlepping as a bar band in Vancouver’s clubs (where it earned the nickname of “Little Led Zeppelin”), cutting their classic album Dreamboat Annie at famed — and now sadly defunct — Mushroom Studios and releasing it on Mushroom’s own short-lived label, before eventually bursting out as one of the defining bands of the early ’70s?

Even though we kinda just did, there’s almost no need to, and pretty much everyone in attendance at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre Friday night was a longtime Heart convert of some kind, either a lover of the band’s ’70s cuts, ’80s pop anthems or even more recent material like that found on their excellent 2012 album Fanatic.

From the start, the concert had the flair of an all-inclusive celebration, with stage props picturing a peace sign, a menorah, a Christmas tree, the yin-yang, and a Hindu Om symbol.

It didn’t take long for fans to show their love, giving Ann a standing ovation as she stepped onto the stage to sing Joni Mitchell’s River, her voice soaring high on the “teach my feet to fly” line.

Then it was Nancy’s turn to shine as she strummed a lovely cover of Elton John’s Friends, the band — violin (courtesy of producer Ben Mink), guitar (Craig Bartok), keys (Debbie Shair), bass (Dan Rothchild) and drums (Ben Smith) — slowly building up the momentum.

The rock stuff would come later as, early on, the show stuck to the Christmas recipe, guest Shawn Colvin taking the microphone for some seasonal material of her own including a hushed Seal Lullaby.

The lullaby theme continued with Vancouver songstress Sarah McLachlan joining Ann and Nancy for a layered rendition of Irish bedtime song All Through The Night, before McLachlan sat at the piano for some solo material.

“I feel blessed to be here and to be part of this evening,” she said, before singing a breathy Angel.

“That was one of the most heartfelt songs I’ve ever heard,” Ann said, wiping a few tears away after McLachlan’s performance. “I don’t know what I gotta do after that.”

The right thing, of course, was to kick it up a notch and move into blues-rock mode, McLachlan staying to lend a hand on Walking Good, a Zeppelin-esque power ballad from Fanatic where Ann provided touches of flute.

The more theatrical material, like Ann’s version of Harry Nilsson’s Remember, with two Dickens-esque characters sitting at her feet, was a bit strange.

However, once the concert “flicked the switch” and Heart leaped into Barracuda, it was just old fashioned rock ‘n’ roll fun, most of the crowd rising to its feet.

Sure, it made the ornamental props at the back of the stage seem entirely ridiculous, but what better way to shove your pre-Christmas anxieties away than to kick out the jams with Heart, Ann belting her lungs out and Nancy ripping out those killer riffs on tracks like Heartless, a knockout version of Zeppelin’s The Rain Song, Even It Up (that jangly Nancy riff is still so potent), and crowd favourite Crazy On You?

And what about Stairway To Heaven, backed by a choir, as they were last year when they so famously played for Robert Plant, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones in front of President Barack Obama?

It put a nice final bow on a pretty special evening.