Heart Light Up Las Vegas With a Fiery “Straight On” and “Let’s Dance” Medley in 2025
From the very front row at the BleauLive Theater on November 14, 2025, the stage didn’t just look close—it felt overwhelming, almost unreal. The brand-new Fontainebleau lights wrapped Heart in cobalt and gold as you framed the shot on your iPhone 17 Pro Max, locked into 4K at 60 frames per second with Spatial Audio capturing every shout and cymbal wash. This wasn’t just another classic rock show on the Strip. It was a night where a band that had outlasted trends, formats, and even illness was about to prove just how alive their music still is.
By the time the night reached its back half, the Royal Flush Tour story was already written across everyone’s faces. People knew Ann Wilson had come back from cancer treatment to be here, and that knowledge sat underneath every cheer like a quiet extra heartbeat. Earlier in the set, “Bebe Le Strange,” “Never,” “Love Alive,” and “Little Queen” had rolled by in a perfect arc—songs that reminded you this wasn’t nostalgia karaoke, but the real thing, played by the people who built these riffs in the first place. Every time you adjusted your phone, another fan behind you mouthed, “I can’t believe how good she still sounds.”
The theater itself played a huge role in how the moment landed. BleauLive is modern and sleek, but not cavernous, a room where even from the front row you can feel the reflections of your own voice coming back off the walls. When “These Dreams” floated through, phones lifted all around you, tiny stars in the dark. “Crazy on You” hit like a controlled explosion, Nancy’s acoustic intro caught crisply by your camera mic. “Dog & Butterfly” and “Going to California” gave everyone just enough time to breathe again. By the time the heavier, dramatic sweep of “Magic Man,” “You’re the Voice,” and “The Rain Song” had passed, you could tell the band were relaxed, in full command, ready to play.
Then Ann stepped up to the mic with a different sort of energy—the signal that it was “talk time.” The band eased into a soft vamp, just enough groove to keep things moving, while she looked slowly around the room, eyes catching fans who had clearly been with them for decades. Her voice, speaking rather than singing, carried the same smoky weight as her high notes. She thanked Las Vegas for showing up not just once, but for all the years, all the tours. You could feel people leaning in, ready to meet the faces behind the sound.
The band introduction started with that familiar mixture of reverence and mischief Ann has perfected. She turned to the backline first, giving the drummer his moment—Sean T. Lane, as she called him, grinning behind the kit, spinning a stick and crashing into a playful fill that your phone’s mic captured like thunder bouncing off glass. The crowd roared. Then she slid over to the low end, throwing a spotlight on Tony Lucido on bass, who answered with a thick, elastic run that rattled your chest even before you check the recording later with good headphones.
Next came the guitar army. Ann called out Ryan Wariner, who stepped forward with a sly little lick, all taste and flash in one bar, then Ryan Waters, whose heavier tone added that extra snarl under the riffs all night. Each name brought another wave of applause, another little flourish—bent notes, harmonic squeals, a blues run tossed off like it was nothing. When she finally introduced multi-instrumentalist Paul Moak on keys and guitar, he answered with a short, shimmering chord progression that slid right into the ambient pad already floating under her voice. From the front row, you could actually see the moment each player relaxed into the applause, shoulders dropping as years of work got acknowledged in one clean sweep.
Nancy’s introduction came last, of course, and it hit different. Ann didn’t just read her name like a roll call; she wrapped it in gratitude and history, talking briefly about “my sister in life and in crime, on the road all these crazy years.” When Nancy stepped forward and they bumped shoulders, the room erupted. You could hear individual screams around you—people who had grown up air-guitaring that very right hand now watching it from three meters away. On your screen, the two sisters filled the frame for a second, a perfect still image you knew would freeze beautifully at 4K.
Ann let the cheers ride for a moment, then turned the mood with a sly glint in her eye. “All right,” she said, “now that you know everybody up here, how about we play something you can move to?” The band slipped into a low, percussive pulse, Sean riding the hi-hat in tight sixteenths while Tony locked in on a round, insistent bass figure. From the front row, you could feel the sub frequencies through the floor more than you could actually “hear” them. Even before Nancy hit the first recognizable notes, people were already nodding along, sensing that one of the night’s big moments was about to land.
Nancy leaned into the mic, tossed out a quick “This one’s for the lifers out there,” and then slammed into the opening groove of “Straight On.” Immediately the song’s rolling, funky stride took over, that mixture of rock attitude and almost R&B pocket that made it such a standout in Heart’s catalog. Through your iPhone’s lens, her pick hand was a blur, driving the chords while the camera’s stabilizer fought to keep up with the natural sway of your own body. Ann came in right on top, phrasing “Quite some time, I’ve been sittin’ it out” with a half-smile, as if she and the lyrics were sharing a private joke about everything the last few years had thrown at her.
The live arrangement of “Straight On” carried more grit than the studio version, each chorus hitting a little harder than the last. Ann didn’t try to reproduce every nuance from the late-’70s recording; instead, she punched certain lines, let others glide, choosing emphasis with the instinct only decades onstage can teach. Nancy slid little fills between vocal phrases, tossing off tiny blues curls that your mic grabbed with surprising clarity. From the front row you could hear the crowd shouting along on the “straight on, for you” refrain, but when you listened back later in Spatial Audio, the cheers seemed to wrap around you, as if the theater itself were still alive in your headphones.
Somewhere around the middle of the song, the band stretched the groove just a little, riding on Tony’s bass and Sean’s drums while the guitars left more space. Ann stepped back, giving the band room, and the cameras in the room—your phone included—tracked Nancy as she moved closer to the drum riser. That’s where the transition really started. You heard it first as a subtle shift in harmony, a new chord poking through the vamp. It was the feeling of a door opening inside the song, hinting at somewhere bigger they were about to go.
With a quick glance and a raised eyebrow from Nancy, everything snapped into a new shape. Tony shifted straight into that unmistakable “Let’s Dance” bass pattern, simple but heavy, while Paul’s keys painted bright, glassy chords over the top. The lights changed too, washing the stage in neon reds and electric blues, giving the whole scene a vintage-’80s MTV glow. You could feel the recognition spread through the theater like a fuse being lit. People around you started laughing and pointing at the stage, like they’d just been let in on a perfect inside joke: Heart crashing David Bowie’s dance floor.
Ann didn’t rush her entrance. She let the groove settle, let the bass and drums own the room for a few bars. Then she stepped forward and launched into “Let’s Dance,” not as an imitation of Bowie but as a re-casting of the song in her own weathered, powerful tone. Those familiar lines—“Let’s dance, put on your red shoes and dance the blues”—came out slightly darker, more knowing, but still playful. From your vantage point, you could see the way she shaped the consonants, how she leaned into the mic during certain phrases to ride the front edge of the beat.
The crowd response was immediate and physical. People who had stayed seated during earlier songs found themselves standing almost without realizing it, pulled up out of their chairs by that four-on-the-floor drum pattern and the glittering guitar stabs Nancy layered over the top. The theater, so pristine at the start of the night, suddenly felt like a club. Even security guards lining the aisles were bobbing their heads, the whole scene captured on your phone as the camera struggled to decide whether to track the stage or the waving hands in your peripheral vision.
When the band hit the first big chorus, the sound in the room swelled beyond the PA. Fans sang that word—“dance”—like it belonged to them now, not just to Bowie’s original. Nancy dropped in a slightly rougher, rock-edged version of the song’s clean, iconic guitar licks, giving them more bite without losing their shape. Paul thickened the harmonies with keys and backing vocals, and Ryan Wariner and Ryan Waters wove little melodic threads around the main riff, emphasizing that this wasn’t a tribute band covering Bowie; this was Heart absorbing the song into their own universe.
Somewhere in the middle, the band stretched out again, turning the song into a loose, joyful jam. Sean threw extra kicks and snare accents into the groove, the kind of details you might miss in the moment but that jumped out later in your Spatial Audio playback. Tony danced across the fretboard, still anchoring the bassline but tossing in small variations that made the chorus hit even harder when they finally dropped back into it. Ann egged the crowd on, waving her arm in big, sweeping motions, encouraging claps that your mic picked up from all directions, completing the 3D sense of being inside the room.
As they barreled toward the final chorus, you could sense everyone trying to hold onto the moment just a few seconds longer. Ann pushed her voice a little harder, letting a rasp creep in on the higher lines, while Nancy leaned back and dug into the final riffs like she was refusing to let the groove end. The lights flared brighter, almost white for a second, before snapping back into that deep red-blue mix that had defined the whole medley. On your screen, the image seemed to vibrate with the sound, each frame crammed with movement and color.
The ending came like a series of exclamation points: one last run through the “Let’s dance” refrain, a sharp unison stop, and then a ringing chord that Nancy let hang in the air just long enough for people to scream over it. Ann threw her head back and laughed, a genuine, unguarded laugh you could hear clearly when you played the clip back later. The whole band stepped forward together to soak in the applause, the introductions from a few minutes earlier now paying off as the audience cheered each member by name, as if they were old friends instead of world-class players.
When the noise finally settled and the show moved on toward its towering finale—“Alone,” “The Ocean,” “Barracuda”—you could feel that the “Straight On” into “Let’s Dance” section had shifted the night’s emotional center. It wasn’t just a medley. It was Heart staking out the intersection between their own history and the broader rock canon, between their groove and Bowie’s cool, between survival and celebration. From the front row, with your iPhone still warm in your hands, it felt like watching two parallel careers intersect for a few perfect minutes.
Later, listening back with good headphones, the details you half-noticed in the moment suddenly jumped into focus: the way the crowd roared louder when Ann referenced Las Vegas in her banter, the subtle harmonic swell when the band pivoted between songs, the physical sense of the room’s size encoded in that Spatial Audio capture. But even with all that fidelity, what the file really holds isn’t just video quality or technical specs. It’s the proof that on November 14, 2025, at Fontainebleau Las Vegas, Heart introduced their band, hit “Straight On,” slid into “Let’s Dance,” and reminded everyone in that theater—and everyone who will ever watch that clip—what it looks and sounds like when legends refuse to slow down.
