Heart Getting Back To Quieter Sounds

The Seattle band Heart had been written off as a prime example of 1980s excess, marked by synthesized banks of sound and arrangements that got bigger by the second.

But after three platinum albums, “Heart” (1985), “Bad Animals” (1987) and “Brigade” (1990), Ann and Nancy Wilson and guitarist Howard Leese decided it was time to change.

Heart’s latest effort, “The Road Home,” recorded in Seattle during five nights at The Backstage, strips the band to its original roots: acoustic guitar and mandolin, unembellished harmonies, and Ann’s still-powerful, but more tempered, voice.

A recurring theme in the record is rebirth, and Wilson feels “refreshed” since she adopted her daughter, who is now 5.

Taking time away from constant touring helped, too.

“I was having some pretty severe problems with stage fright,” she said. “We were having some intergroup strife. … I felt overwhelmed by the hugeness of it all. … (Now) I’ve got no further trouble with stage fright. I just needed a breath and some reinvention.”

What makes “The Road Home” so striking is that reinvention: The record makes formerly electric songs acoustic, changing not only the sound but the meaning and intention of a song as well.

One of the band’s earliest hits, “Crazy on You,” becomes a jazzy pressure cooker, with the Seattle Symphony’s string quartet providing a vibrating hornets’ nest of chords. There are several covers: Joni Mitchell’s “River,” Elton John’s “Seasons” and the old rock chestnut “Love Hurts.”

Later hits like “Alone” and “All I Want to Do Is Make Love to You” metamorphose from aggressively sexual come-ons into tender, romantic pleas.

Of “Alone,” Wilson says, “I get a chance to, as a singer, really do something with it, to have the nice bare stage to be eloquent and be delicate and gentle, which, all through the ‘80s, I hardly got a chance to do at all.”