Fucking song of the year. It was the whole shift, because what he was, was passionate. So I owe him a great deal of respect. I played golf with him about three years ago just so I could tell him how much I had appreciated it.

AS: When you completed the song, before you got this reaction from Ienner, did you feel it was something special? It has no chance. PM: Honestly, it feels like she wrote it. I needed it. There are so many songs that are about real things, but we as artists have to make them appealing to the listener. You have to figure out how to get people to care about it. AS: Count me as one of those people that was fooled and thought it was about a romantic relationship.

Like the line about the scar, where you were referring to an actual scar that you have, I thought it was about the figurative scars of a jilted lover. There is a great groove in there.

What do you remember about balancing those elements in the recording? AS: How did you end up with Paul Buckmaster arranging the strings? But could you foresee just how big it was going to be, even with all that? And then, like most people, I got a little tired of hearing it played everywhere.

It may have been that I had missed his earlier interviews about the meaning of the song. Or maybe I had heard the explanation but had not connected with the explanation as I did now around a time when I had lost two people very close to me. But hearing his explanation made the song make a lot of sense to me. Pretty cool. Monahan wrote the song in less than an hour. The song came to him in a dream, and after he woke up, the song was in his head.

When he woke up, he took about thirty minutes to write it down and sing the words into a Dictaphone. The next night before bed he finished it up, and the song that was a conversation with his late mom was complete. And tell me, did Venus blow your mind? Was it everything you wanted to find?

And did you miss me While you were looking for yourself out there? Monahan thanked his mom when he accepted the award. Of course, the great thing about songs is that you can always interpret them in your own way to find something for your own life.

I suppose it does. A lot has happened in 20 years. I'm a lot happier than I was back then. I think that whole album is based on a lot of sadness and questions and really not having faith in the future, but now, it's a different life that I live. So, it's pretty cool to look back at that. Well, I was in a bad relationship, and I was traveling so much and I had children. It was after the first album that had " Meet Virginia " on it.

It was still a time [when] there was no real money. We sold a million albums but it didn't mean that I was living in any type of luxury at all. The only thing I was able to do at that point was to pay off my credit card debt. We were traveling the U. We may have even gone to Australia with it, but we never really went to Europe or anything. There wasn't a big push in Europe for "Meet Virginia," so writing the second record was, I would say, more pressure than I've ever felt in my life. We knew [we needed to write] some type of song that people would care about or the chances of making another record were going to be slim.

There were moments on that first tour that I met a lot of people, and I was seeing so many beautiful faces and meeting boys and girls and everything you could think of. But I was married, so there was no anything I could do about any kind of attraction I might have had. So, I had to write songs instead. This is the magic of what a relationship should feel like. We thought that was an obvious first single. We just thought that was the coolest song ever.

When we listen now, it's obvious that it's not. But nobody else thought it was a first single, and we were really surprised.

So everything obvious in my career is never the single. I should never judge what a single sounds like because it's the weird ones that make it to the forefront of radio and peoples' brains. It had tempo. We thought [sings hook] "She's on fiiiiiire! That sat there in a great American way. Americana, I should say. It did OK. Not like we imagined. And I think it came from the fact that "Drops of Jupiter" was so big that it still had some momentum, even though the second single was supposed to be a song called "Something More.

That was more about a fantasy of what I had always hoped to go home to. Being on the road for months and months and months and coming home, my fantasy was to come home to someone who was as excited to see me come home as I was excited to be home.

That kind of thing. That's what that song's about. That entire album is either me apologizing for shit or hoping for things, and it continued into the next album, with " Calling All Angels. From what you've described regarding the first few tunes, it seems like there was a tension between home life and tour life. Of course! I mean, I was 28, My son was born when I was 23, and I was sober.

I had been sober for a long time because I knew what it was going to take for a guy from Erie, Pennsylvania, to try to be successful to be in a potentially dangerous industry. Everyone around me was partying and having multiple fun relationships and I was just working. Now, we get to the big one. Obviously, a product of grief. A really personal one and also the biggest hit. You know, somebody asked me the other day about that, because I had lost my mother that year and we were writing and it was hard to be inspired by anything when a boy loses his mom.

It was very tragic. But somebody asked me, "How do you feel that potentially the biggest song of your career means so much to you? It wasn't like, "Oh yeah, we just came up with [mimics guitar riff] 'Doo-dow-now-now! I've never really thought about that. I wrote that song in 15 minutes, man.

I fell asleep and woke up and it was like my mom tapped on the shoulder, and she was like, "Let's go. I can do whatever I want. One thing about "Drops of Jupiter" that a lot of people don't talk about is that it had two veterans on it—Paul Buckmaster and Chuck Leavell.

Chuck Leavell, man. He made that song as magical as it could have been because he gave it that bounce. You're good. Thank you! No, actually. That was Brendan O'Brien. We recorded that record in Atlanta, and we did not have "Drops of Jupiter. So, Brendan, all of a sudden, was open and he took the project. Chuck Leavell is also a Georgian, and he owns a tree farm in Georgia. He called Chuck because Chuck was an hour away and he came and did it, and it was that easy.

That was actually [music executive] Donnie Ienner's idea. When we didn't have a single, we also had an agreement in the band that we weren't to write outside the band. Which really put shackles on us, but we weren't aware of it at the time.

You protect things that you end up breaking. I was being asked to meet Donnie Ienner in New York, and he was about to say, "You have to write outside the band. It's time. It was two days before that meeting when I dreamt "Drops of Jupiter. So, I went to New York to have that meeting with him and I had a demo of it in my pocket. That's when I played it for him.

At the time, Almost Famous was the biggest movie in the country and Elton John 's songs were all over it. So as soon as Donnie heard the song, he was like, "Paul Buckmaster has to do the strings. Have you seen that?

You know what it taught me? Humans will overthink anything! Why did he throw that ball that way? Well, I'll tell you why! Because in fifth grade, he met a girl called Sheila!

Who knows what anything is, you know? Let's say you're making a sad album. Today would be different than it was when I was trying to become something.

Today, you could go make a sad album and then 15 minutes later go make a different album. And you have a computer, so you can make three albums in a week, or whatever. But when you have one chance to make an album and it potentially costs a couple of hundred thousand dollars, you start to want to feed the machine that's going to feed you.

That was a song that we thought, "Man, it's got tempo and this cool drum bit and whatever. We played it for years live and people seemed to like it because we needed that type of song, but it didn't make a huge impression on people.

I'm a songwriter myself, and I think we all have material that feels like juvenilia. It's not us anymore. Can you still inhabit the self that made this album? Of course. It's like looking at—I wouldn't say a lesser me, but a part of me that needed to do this to be better at certain things. My manager and I talked the other day and he was like, "Man, we're listening to these songs you wrote that didn't make the album. There's a handful of them. Your melodies are so much more complex and thought-through and better.

There's no melody there. It's just a guy trying to rap who can't. It's funny in some regard, but in another way, I needed to be a young guy trying to figure stuff out. When I was [touring], "Hopeless" was, like, I was hopeless. I felt hopeless all the time. It's a wild trip. The importance of love in a human body, that need for love and affection and somebody to look at you with love, is so necessary. I was writing songs just like, "Man, I'm writing as a voyeur. I'm writing somebody else's life, but it's just like a reflection of my own.

That was a very particular song about a guy that I went to grade school who I and my friends didn't treat properly. We're friends today and I love him a lot. He's a wonderful guy. But I have a lot of regret about a certain couple of years of my young childhood life.

Not beating people up or anything. It wasn't like that. But it was "bully" enough that it excluded him. And that exclusion made us, the others, feel closer. That's what happens when kids are not kind. I really regretted that and still do, and that's what that song is about. Everybody needs respect, and now I know that, so I'm sorry. You know, he's such the kind of fella—he's a bodybuilder and could beat me up 1, times a day if he wanted. His lesson during that wasn't to hold a grudge, thankfully.

His lesson was "I've just got to get through this," and he did. And he became a big, tough, strong guy so he wouldn't have to deal with guys like me and other people anymore. We all learned what we were supposed to, I suppose.

That was the biggest song about my mom. That was the heartbreaking "I'm lost now. The way I found out my mother was terminally ill was [through] my sister. You need to call her. So after the show, I went outside the venue to a payphone and just cried on the phone with my mom for an hour, with her telling me that she was going to be sick for what we hoped was going to be a long time, but it wasn't.

She was gone quickly, but that's what that song is about: "I don't know how to let this thing roll, but I've just got to remember you'll be in me forever. It wasn't the magic that "Drops of Jupiter" was, but we thought it at the time. That was my speaking out against the life I was living: "I'll get through this and I'll be something more.

It was at a weird time because as I said before, we were trying to write only within the band. Our drummer at the time, his name is Scott. He wasn't writing anything, so I was like, "Dude, learn how to write. We all have to write within this project. Go do it. So he got the keyboard and wrote the [mimics vamp] because he was a novice writer. He was writing whatever he felt in those weird minor keys and stuff.

Nobody else was really writing that, so it became a fun little project to jump-start somebody's writing style. Before we hit the last three songs, tell me what it was like to be frightened and on tour and newly famous during that boom for the music industry. I guess it was a boom, right? In the early s? That high of being on stage versus sobbing on the payphone with your mom, that's such a crash to Earth.

It never really felt like a boom. It just never did. Because there's a thing that happened where "Meet Virginia," it was an underground [success]. When people find a new band, it's like ownership. I found them, I turned you on to them, you like them because of me —it's ownership. A feeling of "I just found my jam. And pop fans are fickle. They deteriorate. They move on to the next thing.

So, it wasn't a boom. It was a transition, and we had to figure out how to get used to it. Like, did we just lose all the people we gained by touring for three years with a little old song that's like a cool car? And now we're in a Bentley and they're like, 'You've changed'? We had to figure out how to navigate that. Yeah, that was me just being me. We were listening to records that were, like, Sparklehorse. At the time, Whiskeytown, when Ryan Adams just started that project, and his guitar tone.

We were trying to emulate some of those vibes. That was the darker side of what we loved musically. That was my jam at the time because I got to play the vibraphone on it.

It just felt "jazz" to me, and I grew up listening to jazz. That was a song kind of about my parents' relationship. It was "vibe. Instead of "Hey, check out this album," it's more of a playlist of things that have whatever in common. That was our vibe song. I'd like to make a record of vibe songs like "Mississippi" someday. I've got one last question. Where did the muse—or whatever you want to call it—lead you from Drops of Jupiter? Well, it went from "Somebody please come and help me" to finding real love.

True love from somebody I'm supposed to be with. So then, when I wrote " Hey, Soul Sister " and " If It's Love " and the happier songs, this was also a transition because people were like, "Well, that's not the same sad guy that I remember, so I'm not sure if this is for me.

I don't want to go back to that other thing! Your joy is coming from real misery from me, and I've got to move on, too. Nancy Wilson was thumbing through some notes when she found a poem written by her son, Curtis.

Perceptive and probing, it seemed to sum up our politically malignant era—and what was spiritually absent at the core of it. The words were so clever and so whimsical. He was like, 'Black and white, wrong and right. It's a contrast from the heavy times we've had to live through and puts it in a different tonality.

Really, Wilson is preoccupied with in-betweens throughout the album—the spaces between life and death, dreams and memories, good relationships and poisonous ones. It's also her first solo album ever , despite making music with her sister, Ann Wilson, in Heart for nearly a half-century.

Over the decades, what was the biggest obstacle to putting out a solo album, whether internal or external? Well, I think I would call it the vortex that's Heart.

There's a vortex of the work ethic of Heart for the last almost 50 years, just to be honest. I hate to even date it. But it's been a mind-bending job to do every year for the touring of it and the album after album—mainly, the touring of it all. You know, everywhere with electricity, we've played there. It's an interesting dichotomy with the pandemic stopping the hurtling, you know. Heart's been hurtling through space for nearly 50 years.

It's an interesting contrast to that to have to be shut in and be at home and stop the momentum and reconvene with your personal soul and self, in order to be able to know what to do musically and creatively with that time I had in my hands like everybody has had. It's really a blessing, you know? It's been a blessing outside of the larger curse of it all to be able to reconvene with your communication with your own self. That's dedicated to my mom, who left us quite a while ago now.

She's still in my skin, in my DNA. So it's kind of a gravity-free zone where I can talk to her in that song. I think the word "gravity," in and of itself, kind of keeps the song from walking that too-precious kind of a line. I think the personal, confessional kind of thing about this album—it's almost too sweet.

It walks a line that's almost too sweet, but I think in another way, you could say that it's more of a revolutionary act to be that open and that honest. Walking the line of sweetness can be more of a rock attitude than hiding out behind your feelings. I'm sort of burying a lot of my feelings in this album.

And, you know, tongue-in-cheek stuff too, but the honesty of it is kind of a rebellious act on a certain level. It seems like you're preoccupied with that line where sweetness could tip over into treacle. You're consciously trying to stay on the right side of that. Yeah, exactly. It's almost, like, not supposed to happen. You're not supposed to do that. It's against the rules to be that honest, to bare your soul like that.

I guess if that's an issue, then I don't know what is. She was a steel magnolia. I got a lot of her strength along the way. A military family, right? Marine corps, all those travels we had growing up were a strengthening kind of thing.

We became really tight-knit as a family because we were always moving. Early touring experience, actually! She was the mom and my dad because our dad was off fighting wars.

It's a total tribute to that strength of her character and her nurturing, strong, amazing … She was an amazing woman. When I sometimes dream of her, I feel like I got to see her again and I get to talk to her again. It's a zero-gravity space, and that's what the song is all about.

Yeah, sure. I took a lot of them too. She taught how to edit film and stuff, with the little editing machine. We used to make films in our family. So, I used a lot of that footage in the actual video for the song and she appears in the video for the song. When I dreamt of her last, it was just her wonderful face. Her spirit. I felt like I had a conversation with her and the words were not even clear. It was just being together and the aspect of her spirit being there.

My collaborator, Sue Ennis, who's worked with us for years and years for Heart songs, had a song for her mom called "Follow Me. We both kind of have a mom thing. We've talked about our parents and we grew up together, so we had all those connective tissue things in our hearts about our moms. So, we kind of collaborated on the ultimate mom song to try to reach into the ether and touch base with that.

We morphed two songs into one. It's a hybrid mom song [laughs]. Well, luckily enough, a few years ago, we got to go to New York, when we used to be able to go anywhere, and we got to see "Springsteen on Broadway" live.

When I saw that show, it completely blew my mind. It changed my world around because I've always loved Springsteen and his amazing writing. Growing up with Springsteen on the radio, for instance, he'd be sort of behind this big wall of sound with this rock and roll accent where you could hardly understand the lyrics. Then, seeing him live, completely by himself, stripped-down, those songs and those lyrics —it completely altered my perception of Bruce Springsteen. He's an insanely great writer.

Those words are so depth-y. Later, after having seen that, I watched it a million times on the show you can watch on television. Then he did Western Stars , his other album that got me through the whole last Heart tour.

It was life-saving stuff for me. So then, when I started to do this album, I was like, "I should do this because of the pandemic. I didn't say hi that night, but I do know him. His people told our people that he really liked my version of 'The Rising'! That made my day—my whole year, actually—to know that he thought it was cool. Sue had actually started that song with Ben Smith, the drummer.

My Seattle folks. They had this song that is, like, a "friend who's going to be there for you" kind of song. The support system that you've always dreamed of having. That's what the song talks about. I've always been that person where I'm there for my people, you know? I show up. It's a really simple way of saying that you're going to be there for somebody that needs you. And that's a big deal! I mean, that's a huge thing to be able to do for anyone.

Can you describe a recent situation in which you were able to be that for somebody? If you are that person for your other people, it's not an easy role to play to show up for somebody that needs help.

A lot of people don't have that skill, you know? A lot of people are not equipped with the emotional wherewithal to be there for anybody else but themselves. So, that's what that song is all about. I had actually recorded it earlier before I got into doing the album. I'd done that in Austin with an amazing producer, David Rice, for a film, actually, which was made in South Africa. It's a true story about human trafficking in South Africa. This guy, Simon Swart, who made the film—it's about to come out, actually—he wanted to see if there was a song I could do for the film.

And so I decided that "Daughter" would be a really cool idea, because there's a lyric in the song that says, "She holds the hand that holds her down. The movie's called I Am All Girls and it's about to come out. Anyway, that's the backstory on that thing. I've been singing that song all my life, basically.

It's a really amazing song. Somebody told me that the chorus part—the "Lie-la-lie"—was initially a placeholder, but he kept it in the song like that because the verses are so wordy. It sort of opens up and he kept it that way from the initial demo of it. I got Sammy Hagar to sing with me on that because he's a buddy. He's a rock god. He's funny as hell and he's a really good guy. I said, "Why don't you do something with me on my album here?