Ashlee Simpson reflected on her 2004 SNL lip-syncing fail.
The then-20-year-old was a musical performer on the show when a pre-recorded track of her singing “Pieces of Me” played over the music for her song “Autobiography” — leading her to awkwardly dance for a bit, and walk off stage until finally there was a cut to commercial.
In the show’s outro, Ashlee initially attributed the error to the band, saying, “My band started playing the wrong song. I didn’t know what to do so I thought I’d do a hoedown.” She later clarified that the lip-syncing was due to her losing her voice, but her career trajectory was undeniably changed.
On a new episode of the Broad Ideas podcast with Rachel Bilson and Olivia Allen, Ashlee explained that after her rehearsal, her voice started to go. “I’m losing my fucking voice, what am I going to do?” she recalled of the night before her scheduled performance.
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“The next morning I woke up and I couldn’t speak. I saw the voice doctor that day and I had two nodules beating against each other,” she continued.
Ashlee said that she initially refused the performance, adding, “That day I [wrote down], ‘I will not go on. I don’t care, I can’t speak.'” However, she said that a record label exec urged her to go forward with the performance regardless of how little practice time there was.
Looking back, Ashlee said that the experience taught her the “power of [her] no” and that she would refuse the performance if she could go back. “It was a humbling moment for me. I had the number one song, everything was about to go somewhere. The humility of not even understanding what grown-ass people would say about you — like grown men — awful, awful things,” she continued.
“What was hard for me [was] I wrote all these songs and I did all this, to then almost have your credit completely taken from you,” Ashlee explained, while looking on the bright side. “Having [The Ashlee Simpson Show] at that time was nice because all the people who were my fans stuck with me.”
Ashlee credited a vocal coach with helping her work through the nodes. Ultimately, she said that the experience taught her “personal strength” in believing in herself as an artist and “how to get back up and go again.”
Ashlee was subsequently “nervous” to go back to SNL in later years. She noted, “I went back to SNL with my second album, and I can’t find it anywhere.”
You can watch the full episode here.