Heart

The Seattle band that proved a hard rock group could be led by two women, then spent the next four decades being asked about it. Ann and Nancy Wilson grew up in Bellevue, Washington, daughters of a Marine Corps major whose postings took the family through southern California and Taiwan before they settled outside Seattle. Ann answered a newspaper advertisement for a singer in 1971; Nancy joined in 1974. Dreamboat Annie and Little Queen established them as a guitar band with folk in its bones, and Magic Man, Crazy on You and Barracuda put them on American rock radio permanently.

The original lineup came apart in the early 1980s, and what followed was one of the more complete reinventions in rock. Heart in 1985, Bad Animals in 1987 and Brigade in 1990 traded the guitars for outside songwriters and enormous power ballads, and sold in numbers the first version of the band never approached. They have placed twenty-nine singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and put Top 10 albums on the chart in the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2010s, a span very few acts manage. The studio they built in Seattle and named after their own album, Bad Animals, became the room where Nirvana, Pearl Jam and Soundgarden recorded. Ann, Nancy, Roger Fisher, Steve Fossen, Michael Derosier and Howard Leese were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. Sales stand above 35 million.