Nancy Wilson has been learning to play the fiddle. So far, it’s slow going. “I basically suck,” she says with a laugh.

Have no fear—she’s only had one lesson, and if history is any indication Wilson will master the new instrument soon enough. The self-proclaimed “jill of all trades” is already a whiz on mandolin, keyboards, pedal steel and dulcimer, among others. But no matter how fine a fiddle player she may become, she’ll likely never be stolen away from her first love: the guitar.

From the moment she and older sister Ann saw the Beatles performing on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964, she knew the guitar was the key to her future. Responding to her pleas, her parents gave her a three-quarter-size Stella. “It had a pipe-shaped neck and a movable bridge—which was good, because as it was going out of tune you would move the bridge to compensate!” she recalls. “It was steel-stringed, and the action was way too high. It was painful, but I wanted to play so bad. My parents saw that I was serious, so they swapped it out for something decent. Then I was like, ‘Oh god, I can actually do this.’”

And she did. A decade later she was storming stages alongside vocalist Ann with their band Heart, cranking out FM-radio favorites like “Crazy on You,” “Barracuda,” “Straight On” and “Magic Man”—and landing a blow for female equality simply by thriving in the male-centric rock world. In the mid-’80s the group turned to a slicker, poppier style and dominated Top 40 radio as well with hits “Alone,” “What About Love” and the Nancy-sung chart-topper “These Dreams.”

Heart sat out most of the ’90s, though the Wilson sisters formed the all-acoustic group the Lovemongers and Nancy released a solo album in 1999 (Live at McCabe’s Guitar Shop). She also began scoring the films of director Cameron Crowe, the onetime rock journalist whom she wed in 1986.

The Wilson sisters revived Heart in the early 2000s with a new lineup (lead guitarist Craig Bartock, bass player Ric Markmann, keyboardist Debbie Shair and drummer Ben Smith currently fill out the ranks) and last year released Dreamboat Annie Live, a CD and DVD that featured a live performance of their 1976 debut album in its entirety.

Writing is now underway for what will be Heart’s 13th studio album, the first since 2004’s Jupiter’s Darling. The band plans to begin recording after its summer tour with fellow classic-rock icons Journey and Cheap Trick, and is aiming for an early-’09 release. And at some point Wilson hopes to spend some time mastering that fiddle. “There’s never enough time to learn,” she says with a playful sigh.

We caught up with Wilson at the Los Angeles home she shares with Crowe and their two children as she cheerfully prepared to hit the road and the studio with Heart once more.

One of Heart’s sonic trademarks was always your combination of acoustic and electric guitars. How did you develop that style?
Ann and I started off acoustically. We didn’t know the right kid who had parents with a basement, drums and van, so we went after a folk-rock thing. Our band name at the time was Rapunzel. Ann was our manager, and she had business cards that said something like, “Top 40, Folk and Popular Ballads” (laughs). When Ann was in college, she started singing rock and I continued as an acoustic player. She got a really cool band going in Vancouver, and I finally accepted her open invitation to join. The idea was for me to bring more of the acoustic side in, for the band to have the duality of Led Zeppelin. Then I got to play big, loud electric guitar, too, which was fun.

How did you get used to playing electric?
The hardest thing to adapt to was the stage volume (laughs). I’d already had an electric of my own at home, but I’d never played with a loud rock band in a club. I was struggling to hear the drums and keep up with where we were in the song. And there was no good sound equipment then—we had a couple of floor monitors, maybe. That was the biggest transition—trying to distinguish myself in the din of the live stage sound. Finding my way through that was intimidating, at first.