Despite the fact that she’s a rock star, Nancy Wilson has never hogged the spotlight; she’s always shared it with the people she loves most. The prime example: she kicked off her professional career by becoming the lead guitarist in Heart, a band founded by her older sister, Ann, in the mid-’70s. Heart’s first album was produced in 1976 by an obscure Canadian label, Mushroom, after nobody else would touch it—and that effort, called Dreamboat Annie, went platinum. Since then, Heart has had six mega-platinum albums and two gold ones; they’ve sold more than 30 million records. The sisters tied for the number forty slot on VH1’s list of the 100 Greatest Women in Rock ’n’ Roll—beating out Cher, Sarah Vaughan, Alanis Morrisette, and Melissa Etheridge, to name a few.

These days, Heart is still going strong: Wilson and her sister continue to write new music together, to play concerts every summer to sold-out audiences, and to release albums. Their most recent was 2004’s Jupiter’s Darling, and they’ll be recording another in 2008. “We’ll never be just a jukebox band, recycling our greatest hits,” Wilson has said. Yet jukeboxes all over the country—as well as movie soundtracks—are filled with their anthemic songs, like “Barracuda” and “Straight On.”

Wilson has also had a long-standing personal and professional partnership with movie director Cameron Crowe. Not only has she composed music for many of his films, like Almost Famous and Vanilla Sky, but she’s also been happily married to him since 1986. And in 2000, at the age of forty-six, Wilson gave birth to their children, twin boys.

After talking to her over the phone for a few hours on a recent afternoon—and getting hooked on her infectious laugh, on the optimism her down-to-earth cheerfulness inspired—I found myself wishing there was some way I too could work on something with Nancy Wilson. Then I realized I already had.

—Maura Kelly

I. TINY ROCK STAR

THE BELIEVER: Is there a single moment—maybe seeing a concert as a kid—that made you say, “All right, that’s it, I’m becoming a musician”?

NANCY WILSON: The lightning bolt came out of the heavens and struck Ann and me the first time we saw the Beatles on the Ed Sullivan Show. My family was living on the marine base in Camp Pendleton, California, and we’d all gathered around the little black-and-white TV at our grandmother’s in La Jolla. Most people didn’t have color sets at home back then. There’d been so much anticipation and hype about the Beatles that it was a huge event, like the lunar landing: that was the moment Ann and I heard the call...