LOS ANGELES >> Half a century after the release of 1975’s “Dreamboat Annie,” Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart are on the road. The tour wasn’t necessarily designed to mark the 50th anniversary of the band’s debut album: Heart started playing concerts again in 2023 — the Wilsons’ first gigs together since before the pandemic — only to call off dates last July when Ann announced that she’d been diagnosed with cancer.

Yet the rescheduled road show offers as good a reason as any to consider Heart’s journey over the last five decades from the clubs of the Pacific Northwest to heavy rotation on MTV to an affectionate embrace by rock’s next generation. (Don’t forget that Ann and Nancy appeared on the soundtrack of 1992’s “Singles” alongside Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains.)

Ahead of opening night, the sisters — whose relationship was tested in 2016 when Ann’s husband, Dean Wetter, assaulted Nancy’s twin teenage sons backstage at a show in Washington state — gathered recently on Zoom for a chat. Ann, 74, was at her home in Nashville, Tennessee, and Nancy, 70, at her home in Northern California.

How you feeling at the moment, Ann?

Ann >> I’m feeling like myself again. I got done with a course of chemotherapy a few months ago — that was brutal. But I’m clear.

Did the brutality of chemo come as a shock?

Ann >> I mean, they’re putting poison into you. What do you expect?

What’s it been like to get the show back on its feet?

Nancy >> We need plenty of rehearsing. Unlike a lot of entertainment, we do a 100% skin-in-the-game live rock show. That requires a lot of warmup and a lot of physical training to have flexibility and strength underneath you.

You’re saying Heart doesn’t use pre-recorded tracks. Is that a matter of ethics in your view?

Nancy >> I don’t have a big, fat opinion about people who use playback — everybody kind of uses it these days — but I think what’s been missing in music is the authentic, real thing. There’s a few old, dogged bands like Heart that are still out there doing it the old-fashioned way, which is actually singing and actually playing. When we were out last time, I made a great big blooper on the guitar while I was doing my famous intro to “Crazy on You” — totally train-wrecked it. But everybody in the audience was like, “Wow, how cool is a mistake?” It wasn’t a perfect playback of something that’s not really happening, and I got congratulated for making a human error on a live stage.

You guys did an acoustic performance on Kelly Clarkson’s TV show last year where the vocals were super dialed-in. This is kind of dark to consider —

Ann >> Let’s get dark for a minute.

If you lost the ability to sing at that level, would you feel you had to quit?

Nancy >> I don’t know what we’d do. Bring in a small ensemble of singers to help us get through the more challenging vocal spots? It’s pretty challenging music to sing and play. It’s more than four chords.

You didn’t make it easy on yourselves.

Nancy >> There’s times we curse ourselves for writing music that was purposefully complex. We were trying to show off when we were in our 20s, and now we have to live up to it.

Beyond your commitment to the music, last year’s tour seemed like a way for the two of you to reconnect after a period of turmoil.

Nancy >> Being onstage with each other, no matter what grief or loss or challenge we’re going through emotionally as sisters — it’s a healing process.

Ann >> When you get a cut or a scrape, it doesn’t just heal overnight. It takes maybe a couple of weeks to come back to its new form. I think every time we go onstage together, we get a little bit farther back to the inside jokes and the language we developed through our childhoods. We came up together side by side — learned how to play guitar together and how to sing by sharing a bedroom in our parents’ house and just doing nothing but that all day long. It’s a lot to come back to.

Could that work of reconciliation continue after the tour was interrupted?

Ann >> The stage is where most of the healing takes place. It’s a safe place for us to be.

You both spoke candidly to Rolling Stone about the backstage incident in 2016. A lot of celebrities would avoid talking about it.

Ann >> I think that people who love Heart and care about Nancy and I deserve the truth.

Nancy >> We didn’t come from a Hollywood-style upbringing.

When Chris Cornell inducted Heart into the Rock Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, he said, “Somehow it never occurred to us that Ann and Nancy Wilson were women.” Obviously he meant it in an admiring way. But that quote illustrates a historical tendency to describe Heart’s greatness in masculine terms.

Ann >> That’s always been a pretty deep-seated frustration of mine — that being a woman means you’re just trying to replicate what men are doing.

Nancy >> Coming into it, people were like, “How do you maintain your femininity and still strut around with a big rock guitar?” Why should doing something really powerful be exclusive to one gender or the other?

Ann >> It’s getting better, though. Taylor Swift has opened doors in that she can go out there with her innermost musings about her life, and people love it. They don’t say, “Come on, Taylor — be more of a badass.” Nobody’s really done that since Joni Mitchell.