6 May 2026, Grammy Museum, Los Angeles, CA

I have been very under the weather – and crazy – lately. But I was not going to miss this event, so I hauled myself downtown to the Grammy Museum last night to see the “Crazy On You” woman, Ann Wilson, for the first public screening of her portrait-style documentary, In My Voice, followed by a Q&A with Ann and the film’s director, Barbara Hall.

Music docs have been proliferating for some years. Some are exceptional, insightful, moving, enlightening and full of great footage. I regard the Bee Gees doc, How Can You Mend A Broken Heart, as one of the finest ever made; the final words from Barry Gibb in that film still break me up. And Linda Ronstadt: The Sound Of My Voice is also exceptional and content rich and impactful in asserting Linda’s importance in popular music history. There are many, many other films I have loved and learned from, others I have enjoyed even if they are superficial at best.

Some music docs are just made for the sake of making them, to mark their territory in a way. Ann Wilson’s film felt like that to me. It could have been so much more. I have really high standards, especially when it comes to documenting an artist whose work as a singer and songwriter has been seminal and meaningful throughout my life. But the stories we want to know are not always the stories people want us to know.

This film was startling not for any great insights or even especially good interviews, but for the massive elephant in the room – the complete absence of Ann’s sister Nancy. Ann states up front in the film that Nancy declined to be involved. That in itself is just beyond befuddling, but then, as if in some kind of retaliation, or perhaps by request, every piece of archival footage excluded Nancy. All the Heart concert footage, including the lengthiest portion of the film, the extraordinary performance for Led Zeppelin at the Kennedy Center Honors in 2012, omitted Nancy as though she had never been there. It was bizarre. Beyond bizarre. Even though Ann mentioned her by name a few times in the film, and a few more times in the Q&A after, it was like she had been cut out of the story as much as possible. It was irksome and icky, and if Nancy demanded that it makes me so, so sad; if it was a directive from Ann, even sadder. I noted in my review of the last Heart concert I saw six months ago that the body language between them was strange and unsettling to me. This film even more so.

I feel there is a difference between members of a group that are known for their close professional and personal bond going off into solo ventures and telling their own stories independently of each other, which Ann and Nancy have done, and weirdly ostracising each other in this stonewalling kind of way, which they have also done. The film scampers around key moments in Ann’s professional and personal life, downplaying or ignoring periods and projects I would have liked highlighted – especially and importantly their sumptuous unplugged-style concert, recording and film The Road Home, coming as it did in the midst of the Seattle grunge period Ann insists held them back, when it actually never did at all.

The filmmaker introduced the film by saying she needed to cut it to 75 minutes and as Ann executive produced, it’s likely the story arc was how she wanted it to be. But with no Nancy, no discussion of how they wrote together, performed together, their symbiotic connection, Ann seems to want to negate everything that was always stated in earlier documentations of her, be it the 1999 Behind The Music special or the dual autobiography Ann and Nancy published in 2012, Kicking and Dreaming. Both of which Ann seemed to have forgotten ever happened as during the Q&A she talked about whether she might ever write a book about her life, and how she was surprised by all the archival footage uncovered for this new film. Huh?

None of it felt fresh and newly discovered to me. It just felt like every frame was devised to erase Nancy Wilson from the Ann Wilson story. Yesterday Ann released a song she says she had written with Burt Bacharach in the 1990s that had never seen the light of day. It’s a lovely song and the making of it features in the latter part of the documentary. But a tiny bit of research reveals the lyrics were by Ann and Nancy together and they had performed it on stage with Heart back then. So… Huh?

There were some sweet positives. The blossoming of a shy teenager who felt affronted by overtly sexual reactions from female audience members at a Led Zeppelin concert in the late 1960s and then moved up to Canada to be with her draft-dodging boyfriend, the magic man who was her muse until he left her for someone else, was a story I knew but enjoyed being told in visual detail. One thing I did truly love from that early career storytelling was the background to, and focus on, the Dreamboat Annie deep cut “How Deep It Goes”, which has always been one of the most meaningful Heart songs in my life. I am grateful for what I learned about that song in the film. I wish there had been more of that.

I’m a harsh critic, and it is better to have something new out there on such a magnificent artist than nothing at all, but overall I was disappointed. Ann, fully recovered from cancer and about to turn 76, looked beautiful last night. She had support in the small audience from people who go all the way back such as Roger Fisher, original Heart guitarist, and many die-hard fans, her faithful Heartmongers, of which I am one. I held back during the Q&A because my questions wouldn’t have been welcome, but if I could ever talk to Ann, I would simply ask her why she wants to be revisionist so late in her life and career, and why she continually downplays the Private Audition album that in fact contained some of the loveliest songs she, Nancy and Sue Ennis (also curiously absent from the film) ever wrote. But that’s possibly another story for me to write.

So there you are, a new documentary on a brilliant artist who wants her story told “in her voice” and that means, for whatever reasons, silencing the voice of her most significant and brilliantly talented life and music collaborator.

Go figure.

Oh, and in the Q&A when asked what artist she would still like to work with, she emphatically declared she wants to work with Brandi Carlile. Now that is something I would like to see happen: Brandi producing and possibly singing on an Ann Wilson solo record that actually brings out Ann’s best voice and heart and reveals more about how deep it all goes.

Note: Pics just taken on iPhone, hence some graininess.