Heart Deliver “Magic Man” in Montreal with Ann Wilson’s Unstoppable Voice
Ann Wilson arrived at Montreal’s Centre Bell on April 2, 2025 radiating that familiar calm-before-the-storm presence, the kind that makes a big room feel like it’s holding its breath. She was seated, performing from a wheelchair with her left arm supported—an image both unexpected and deeply rock ’n’ roll in its own right. Rather than diminishing her power, the seated stance concentrated it. Montreal fans leaned forward, curious and protective at once, ready to meet the band halfway. The stage lighting cut through a low, anticipatory buzz, and the first chords of the night drew a map back through decades of Heart’s history, toward the moment many had come to hear: “Magic Man.”
The Royal Flush 2025 run had been circled on calendars for months, especially after 2024’s postponements and Ann’s public health battle. Context mattered: the tour’s resumption had the energy of a second chance, the kind that turns an ordinary Wednesday into a milestone. Montreal is a city that treats legacy acts with reverence, but it also expects them to bring it. The Wilson sisters and their band understood the assignment. They structured the set with a veteran’s instinct—bright openers to jolt the room awake, then early-era material to spark collective memory, and finally the heavy-hitters to push the arena over the top. That arc created the perfect runway for “Magic Man.”
Let’s talk framing: Ann’s choice to perform seated was never going to read as anything but courageous to a crowd that has aged with Heart. On this tour she’d explained the wheelchair clearly and candidly—pain, balance, protection after injury—putting the focus back where it belonged: the singing. Montrealers got that; empathy was the undertone of the night. When she settled into her posture at center stage, eyes lifted to the far seats, you could feel thousands of people silently rearranging their expectations, not downward, but toward a different kind of intensity—less prowling, more precision, less movement, more concentration.
“Magic Man” works best when the band treats it like a fuse—slow-burning at first, then suddenly racing. Nancy Wilson’s guitar lines sketched those familiar contours, bright and lyrical, while the rhythm section held a heartbeat thump that’s deceptively simple on record and somehow more urgent live. Montreal’s acoustics did the rest, with the upper tiers returning a soft echo that wrapped around the chorus. In a seated posture, Ann delivered the verses like a storyteller pulling you closer by lowering her voice rather than raising it. She let the vowels bloom and linger, turning the arena into a resonant chamber where every syllable carried memory.
There’s something about hearing “Cold, late night so long ago” sung by a woman who has shepherded that line across generations. In Montreal, the lyric landed with a special edge—part youthful myth, part lived wisdom. Ann didn’t need to sell it with gesture; the dynamics did the talking. She feathered the ends of phrases, clipped others with just enough grit to hint at the engine underneath. The wheelchair made the audience attend to micro-moments—breath, placement, phrasing—that can blur past when a vocalist is pacing from riser to riser. The result was intimate, paradoxically, in a building built for spectacle.
As the arrangement opened up, the band gave her more air, widening the groove while staying nimble. Nancy threaded in those crystalline figures that have always been the song’s secret weapon—ornamental, yes, but also propulsive, nudging the melody forward. Live, the rhythm guitar’s chime and the drumkit’s crisp ride pattern added a modern sheen to a 1976 classic, neither nostalgic nor sterile. Montreal’s crowd cued into that balance. You could see it in heads tilting up and to the right—a universal sign for “wait, this sounds exactly right.” When the pre-chorus swelled, so did the voices around the bowl, a chorus of generations.
Ann’s high notes can still slice through a hall like a bright wire, but what stood out in Montreal was control—statuesque, economical, surgical. She chose her moments to lean in, reserving the upper register bursts for places where the lyric demands a flare. It’s a masterclass move: by underplaying the line before, you make the payoff feel inevitable instead of showy. The wheelchair, the sling—these physical constraints became a frame that sharpened the picture. The focus on tone, not theatrics, made the “Magic Man” refrain feel less like a sing-along and more like a spell the room constructed together.
Montreal crowds are famous for singing, but they’re also good listeners. Between choruses, you could hear a hush that wasn’t silence so much as collective concentration, people trying to hear the guitar voicings, the backing vocal blend, the spaces between Ann’s phrases. It’s in those spaces that a performance turns from good to special. When the band hit the instrumental passage, Nancy’s guitar took on a burnished quality—more copper than chrome—trading with keys that filled the edges without flooding the center. The transition back into Ann’s vocal felt like a camera dolly-in, slow and smooth, setting up the last chorus to feel earned.
One of the night’s subplots was resilience. 2024 had put Heart on pause, and the 2025 return carried the weight of deferred momentum. By placing “Magic Man” early in the set, the band telegraphed confidence: deliver a signature song before the crowd is fully warmed up, and you force the room to rise to you. In Montreal, it worked beautifully. The early placement reframed the rest of the show as additive rather than preparatory, a sequence of chapters instead of a grind toward one big closer. “Magic Man” became the thesis statement—melody first, stories told by grownups who’ve earned them.
Fan-shot angles circulating after the show captured something you couldn’t miss in the building: Ann’s eyes. Seated, she made eye contact a weapon—steady, warm, a little mischievous. It’s the look of a singer who knows she can win a room by holding a note one beat longer than expected. In those clips you hear the audience inhale at the same time, the group gasp that means the timing landed. That’s stagecraft you can’t fake. It’s also proof that performing seated isn’t a limitation when your instrument is your voice and your command of silence.
Thematically, “Magic Man” is a negotiation between innocence and experience, the tug-of-war between a story we tell about who we were and who we became. In Montreal, that tension lived in the arrangement. The band kept the tempo disciplined, resisting the temptation to rush—a choice that let the lyric’s emotional geometry unfold naturally. When the final chorus surged, the harmony vocals pressed forward, adding lift without density. Ann’s final lines floated above, supported rather than swallowed. The applause that followed wasn’t a detonation; it was a rising wave, the kind that keeps going after the lights dim for a breath.
What made the performance special, ultimately, was the feeling of a shared pact. The audience agreed to listen harder; the band agreed to play with intent; Ann agreed to deliver feeling with elegance instead of force. That pact is rare in big rooms, where bombast wins more easily than nuance. Montreal turned nuance into an arena sport. You felt it at the end of “Magic Man,” when the cheers didn’t crash and fall but hovered, as if the crowd wanted to keep the song’s afterglow intact for whatever came next.
It’s easy to romanticize veteran artists, to project invincibility onto them. The truth is more interesting: great performers adapt. Ann Wilson adapted—wheelchair, sling, different stage geometry, same emotional voltage. That adaptation didn’t just preserve the show; it deepened it. You saw fans recalibrate in real time, moving from “I hope she’s okay” to “I can’t believe how good this sounds.” That pivot is the night’s legacy. Montreal didn’t just witness resilience; it co-authored it, answering measured power with measured devotion.
“Magic Man” also reminded everyone how unusual Heart’s catalog is—songs that are both FM-radio familiar and harmonically interesting, built for connection but engineered with craft. In Montreal, those qualities snapped into focus. The guitars sparkled without harshness, the keys sat in the mix like stained glass, and the rhythm section played with a dancer’s balance—heel-toe, heel-toe—keeping the pocket buoyant. The arrangement didn’t need reinvention; it needed intention. That’s exactly what the band brought, and it’s why the performance felt fresh without novelty for novelty’s sake.
If you were tracking the setlists across the tour, you knew “Magic Man” was a sure bet, but it still landed like a gift. Part of that is Montreal itself—crowds here treat classic songs like communal property, sung with gratitude rather than entitlement. Part of it is the Wilsons’ chemistry, an intuitive conversation that unfolds in glances and musical choices. When Nancy leaned into the signature figure before the last chorus, Ann set her shoulders, smiled, and let the line unfurl. In the cheap seats, people put their phones down for ten seconds and just listened. In 2025, that’s as strong a review as you can get.
And yes, the history wrapped around the night mattered. Heart had rescheduled, re-routed, and recommitted, and you could feel the gratitude humming beneath everything. The show wasn’t framed as a triumph over adversity; it was framed as music winning another round against everything that keeps us home. There is a dignity to showing up and delivering the goods, even—especially—when your body insists on plan B. Ann’s explanation of the wheelchair earlier in the run helped dispel unhelpful drama and replaced it with empathy and clarity: we’re here to sing, and sing well. Montreal got the message.
By the time the set marched forward, “Magic Man” had become the night’s lodestar, the point every later song gently orbited. You could hear it in how the crowd sang subsequent choruses, looser and louder, as though the early spell had granted permission to lean all the way in. That’s the alchemy of a well-placed classic: it doesn’t end when it ends. It echoes in the choices that follow, in the patience of a ballad, in the swagger of a riff, in the confidence of a front-person who just reminded the room that voice and song, properly paired, can lift anything.
What will people remember months from now? The seated silhouette under Montreal’s lights. The ease with which Nancy’s guitar revisited a part she’s played a thousand times and somehow made it feel first-time dangerous. The crowd’s hush. The return to volume. The way “Magic Man” avoided nostalgia’s sugar-rush trap and instead went for something steadier: belonging. For a few minutes, a 20,000-seat building felt like a living room, the corners filled with old stories told well and the center held by a voice that can still bend time.
And that—in an era of spectacle arms races and algorithm-chasing set pieces—might be the night’s most special thing. Montreal didn’t need confetti cannons to remember April 2, 2025. It needed a song, played with respect and adventure, and a singer who knows exactly how to land it. “Magic Man” did the job. It reminded everyone why they fell for Heart in the first place, and why they keep coming back: because when Ann Wilson decides to draw a breath and let it fly, a big room turns small, and a good show becomes a story you tell.
