My review of Ann Wilson’s album Hope & Glory has been published on Blogcritics.org. I’ve had the advance copy for about a month now, and I’ve been enjoying it very much. The funny thing is that all this time I’ve had the two Wilsons (Ann & Nancy) confused in my head, and I was thinking that this is Nancy’s solo album. I should have known better, since I kept musing over how much her vocals sound like Ann’s. D’oh.
The album is being released on Tuesday, September 11th, which is apropos considering how politicized the Al-Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon have become. There are several albums of protest music being released on that day, and this is one of them. Wilson has drawn on some of her favorite songs of the past forty years and put together a collection that includes interpretations of classics from John Lennon and Neil Young. It’s not an overtly political album, but it does serve to highlight the relevance of these classic songs in the modern world. Wilson says, “I’ve been itching to make some sort of comment about our times, but I didn’t want to do it in a way that was really abrasive and just shouting for the sake of shouting.”
