How long did it take for you to like The Wild Heart?

[HejiraNYC]

Originally Posted by SortaSavageLike

I bought a copy of this album on Saturday, I've listened to it three times, and I'm kind of having hard time getting used to it. There are times on this album where Stevie's voice sounds better than before, and at times it's so unpleasantly rough I want to press the Skip button. The synthesizers on the three songs she wrote with Sandy Stewart jangle my nerves a bit; they practically ruined Nightbird for me.

Am I missing something, or do I need to listen to it a few more times?

I am biased since I got it the day it came out (after wearing out the Stand Back/Garbo single for weeks). My initial impression was that the title track was the most killer thing I had ever heard in my life... but the rest of the album never quite made it to par. And I am probably in the great minority here by saying that I did not/do not care for "Sable on Blond" at all. Maybe it's because I am forever scarred by the scathing review in Rolling Stone that compared SoB to a toilet paper commercial jingle. And it's only in recent years that I have grown to love "Nightbird." When it was released as a single back then, I was like WTF? I was convinced that "I Will Run to You" would have been the second monster single...

That being said, despite all of its flaws, in hindsight I think The Wild heart was the quintessential Stevie album, even moreso than Bella Donna, which had a decided masculinity about it, probably due to the fact that it was almost entirely a Tom Petty/Heartbreakers album. WH is a shamelessly girl-power album, probably since her major collaborator was Sandy Stewart. But the lyrics and the vocals were more passionate, more romantic, more self-indulgent, replete with images of boots, blankets, gardens, capes, hearts, etc. In a nutshell, it was Stevie to the nth power.