Heart have postponed their remaining North American tour dates after Ann Wilson revealed that she is undergoing cancer treatment.
In a statement, Wilson said she recently “underwent an operation to remove something that, as it turns out, was cancerous.” The musician said she’s “feeling great” after the “successful” procedure, but she’s decided to follow her doctor’s advice to“undergo a course of preventative chemotherapy.”
Wilson continued: “And so my doctors are instructing me to take the rest of the year away from the stage in order to fully recover. To the ticket buyers, I really do wish we could do these gigs. Please know that I absolutely plan to be back on stage in 2025. My team is getting those details sorted and we’ll let you know the plan as soon as we can. Thank you all for the support. This is merely a pause. I’ve much more to sing.”
Heart’s canceled dates include the remainder of their headlining Royal Flush tour with Cheap Trick. The first leg of the trek ran during April and May and was set to pick up again in August, with shows scheduled through September. Heart will also have to miss the handful of shows they were set to open for Def Leppard and Journey in late July and early August.
Tickets for the original Royal Flush shows will be honored at the make-up dates. Information regarding the rescheduled shows will be announced in the coming weeks.
Heart’s decision to postpone their remaining 2024 shows comes after a European tour (originally scheduled for June and July) was called off at the end of May. At the time, the band said only that Wilson would be undergoing a “time-sensitive but routine medical procedure for which the minimum recovery time is six weeks.”
Heart’s 2024 shows notably found sisters Ann and Nancy Wilson reuniting after they put the band on hiatus between 2016 and 2019 due to a family spat. In the interim, the two toured under different banners, as Ann put it to Rolling Stone in an interview about their reunion earlier this year: “We just got really tired of not playing together, and we both wanted to do a Heart tour. So then there is this question hanging in the air: Can Heart be Heart without Ann or can Heart be Heart without Nancy? It never could… We just went, ‘Well, let’s do what we have to do.’ Our discomforts of the past, at least from my perspective, have really been ironed out.”
From Rolling Stone US
