Heart’s Ann Wilson and her sister Nancy had one mission when they performed “Stairway to Heaven” at the 2012 Kennedy Center Honors: impress Led Zeppelin. But standing in front of the band’s surviving members — and an audience packed with some of the world’s biggest stars — nearly got the better of them.
“We both kind of looked at each other with these big owl eyes,” Wilson recalled of the moments before they walked onstage.
The sisters ultimately pushed through their nerves, delivering a performance that moved the Zeppelin members to tears. And when they met Jimmy Page and Robert Plant afterward, they got the reaction they’d hoped for.
“They were very happy and said they really liked our performance,” Wilson tells Guitar World in a new interview. “That was a big deal because so many bands have tried to cover Zeppelin, and they don’t enjoy being covered by people that don’t feel it.”
The December 2, 2012, ceremony was a landmark moment for Wilson, who had grown up studying Page’s guitar work.
“Starting out as a guitar player, I’d sit at Jimmy Page’s knee and learn everything I could from the Zeppelin records,” she said, speaking metaphorically. “The thing about Jimmy is that method or scales don’t even figure in his repertoire. It’s just so crazy and dissonant: I guess it’s right-brain stuff.
“My favorite guitar moments are latter-day songs like ‘The Crunge’ or ‘No Quarter.’ Over the years we’d cross paths, and those guys always walked around with a serious gravitas. You didn’t feel like going up because they had their own atmosphere.”
Wilson also recalled the experience in a 2024 interview with Matt Pinfield of 955KLOS, describing how the scale of the production didn’t fully hit her until the afternoon rehearsal.
“I actually saw the production that had been planned for ’Stairway’ and all the different choir singers, and the way it all unfolded and got bigger and bigger and bigger,” she said. “And then I was like, ’Holy shit,’ that is going to be great."
The audience was another revelation.
“It’s like all these super famous people from all walks, not just music, but politics and television and movies. It was amazing. It was really a never-to-be-forgotten experience.”
Still, the sisters had to get past those last-minute jitters. As Wilson recalled, they looked at each other just before taking the stage and made a decision.
“We just decided not to. We just went, ’We’ll do this later. Let’s just go out right now and keep our eyes on the ball and do the song the way we know we can and make it good.’ The mission was to please the Led Zeppelin guys, really. And I think we did."
Afterward, the reception included a meal Wilson jokingly described as a “rubber chicken dinner.”
Wilson is the subject of the upcoming documentary Ann Wilson: In My Voice, arriving November 25.
