Back with their first new album in six years, Heart’s Ann and Nancy Wilson readily confess Red Velvet Car may be their most personal collection of songs ever. “There’s not an inauthentic, fictitious or posing bone in the body of this album,” says Nancy. “We’re telling our story.” Pun intended, the Wilson sisters certainly wear their hearts on their sleeves throughout this 10-song set of first-person adventures and universal feelings of love, loss, pleasure, and pain.

Straight On: Honesty; intimacy; integrity; truth; sincerity; candor. These are some of the buzzwords Ann and Nancy Wilson must have had floating in the back of their minds while writing and recording Red Velvet Car. They certainly weren’t in Heart’s vocabulary early in their career. “We were definitely making a devil’s bargain in the eighties,” says Ann, “and looking back I’m glad we did because it did allow us to transit over a period when we could have fallen into a black hole.” Today, Ann says she and her sister are on professional terra firma, adding that “with this album, we feel like we have something very solid to stand on.”

Nancy adds kindling to the communal nature of the recording of Red Velvet Car by saying, “I said to Ann and [producer/guitarist] Ben [Mink], ‘What we’re doing in the studio with this album this is the way the Indians used to do it. You make a fire, and then you sit around the fire and tell your stories and pass them on with a real sense of one on one human contact.’ We feel like we made quite a fire together.”

The stories told around the figurative fire begin with “There You Go,” a song Ann says wasn’t “some Kumbaya campfire sing-a-long” because of the powerful playing of Nancy and Mink. “It’s like the two of them came from the same mother or something. That definitely works in this band.” Additional tunes like “WTF,” “Queen City,” “Hey You,” “Wheels,” “Death Valley,” “Sand,” “Saffronia’s Mark,” “Sunflower,” and the title track make Ann say, “This feels like one of those albums that only comes around every few decades. So for whatever reasons, this is perhaps our most nakedly personal album we’ve ever done, maybe ever.”

Albums don’t get more personal than Red Velvet Car. At this stage in their career, the Wilson sisters have nothing to hide, and hold nothing back. “Here we are at this point in the band’s history and just like with any lifespan, the longer you live, the longer things look in back of you – and shorter in front of you, too,” says Ann. “So there’s an even greater sense of mortality, of the stakes involved here and an even stronger desire to make every moment on the album matter.”

Straight From The Heart: Sit back and enjoy a special video introduction of Red Velvet Car, hosted by Ann and Nancy Wilson:

As A Matter of Fact…

* The current members of Heart include Ann Wilson (vocals), Nancy Wilson (guitars, vocals), Craig Bartock (guitars), Ben Smith (drums), Debbie Shair (keyboards), and Kristian Attard (bass).

* Formed in Seattle in 1973, Heart was ranked No. 57 on VH1’s 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.

* To date, Heart has sold over 35 million albums worldwide.

* Heart’s North American tour runs through November 4 in Houston.