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Dreamboat Annie (Fantasy Child) Lyrics

Heading out this morning into the sun
Riding on the diamond waves, little darlin' one

Warm wind caress her
Her lover it seems
Oh, Annie
Dreamboat Annie my little ship of dreams
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Cover art for Dreamboat Annie (Fantasy Child) lyrics by Heart

I love this song and I'm surprised no one has commented on it.

To me it's about a country girl that ends up in the big city. No one knows her and she's starting to see that it's not all that it's cracked up to be, but she's still determined to make it.

Cover art for Dreamboat Annie (Fantasy Child) lyrics by Heart

I think it refers to an acid trip....."heading out this morning" ..."alone in the crowd"..."head in the clouds"...."Sad faces painted over with those magazine smiles"...all are, or could be drug references

My Interpretation
Cover art for Dreamboat Annie (Fantasy Child) lyrics by Heart

I heard this story a long time ago from a girl who used to live out West and knew the Wilson sisters....

Apparently Anne Wilson was high on something (probably LSD) one afternoon, and was watching TV. The "Steamboat Willie" Mickey Mouse cartoon came on and she'd never seen it before (this was before VHS, DVDs, etc.) and was quite enamoured with it. She later had a drug-heightened dream where she was floating around on a cloud ship, seeing the world from a surrealistic cartoon-like and negative perspective, and when she woke, wrote down the concept of "Dreamboat Annie".

If the story is true, it's essentially a drug-fueled dream sequence about Anne's loneliness and isolation brought on by (and partially named for) a Disney cartoon.

Cover art for Dreamboat Annie (Fantasy Child) lyrics by Heart

I think it's less about a drug trip or a country girl in the big city, than simply about a creative person who, like all of us at times, sees herself as set apart from the crowds of people around us, drifting off into a dreamland of our own making. Despite the reference to the "lonely one," I see the imagery as largely positive: Annie is a ship, self-sufficient, and enjoying her voyages into the dreamy clouds, which is why she "won't be back for a while." Of course Annie must in part be Ann Wilson herself, the co-author of the song who finds inspiration for her unique art in events and settings which seem mundane and saddening to others. Too many people, instead of making art about the life around us, simply cover their sadness with cheap commercial "art," burying themselves in magazines covered with the posed smiles of someone else. They too are lost in a dreamworld, but someone else's--Annie's dreamworld is hers alone.