It’s hard to believe it’s almost been 20 years since Ashlee Simpson appeared on Saturday Night Live and endured a lip-syncing blunder on live TV that turned into a PR fiasco for her. Looking at the situation from a 2024 lens offers a much different perspective for her fans and for Simpson, too, because it impacted the trajectory of her career.
Simpson shared her thoughts on the pending 20th anniversary on the Feb. 19 episode of the Broad Ideas With Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen podcast. “I’ve never talked about or said, but it’s like the other thing is, learning as a woman, when you say no or as an artist or a human or whatever, that day I said ‘I will not go on, I don’t care. I can’t speak,’” she said. Simpson was only 20 when she was the musical guest on the late-night comedy show and had the unfortunate experience of suffering from vocal issues during that week. She had “two nodules beating against each other” which caused her to lose her voice ahead of her performance.
Her gut instinct was to cancel her performance, but she alleged that she was pressured to perform with a pre-recorded track. “My band has never practiced this, this is not going to go well,” Simpson recollected. “I can’t do this.” Her first song, “Pieces of Me,” went off without a hitch, but when she went to sing her second song later in the show, “Autobiography,” the first song began playing with Simpson’s voice. It became clear to the audience that she was lip-syncing, and she awkwardly danced off the stage.
The backlash was intense because Simpson didn’t have the experience to handle such a blunder, which was reportedly caused by her drummer playing the wrong track. “I feel like it was a humbling moment for me,” she explained. “I had the number one song, it was, like, everything was about go, like, somewhere and then it was just, like, woah. The humility of not even understanding what grown-ass people would say about you, awful, awful things.” It didn’t help that 60 Minutes happened to be there that week doing a feature on executive producer Lorne Michaels, who basically threw her under the bus.
He claimed that he knew nothing about the lip-syncing proposal. “If the plan had been, ya know like, they’d done the Thursday rehearsal and had lip-synched and said, ‘Well, that’s what we do,’ then we would have said, ‘No, we can’t do that’,” Michaels said in 2004 while noting it was the first time he’s ever had a musical guest walk out in the middle of a performance. Oof. The aftermath was covered on her MTV reality series, The Ashlee Simpson Show, where she learned about the medical issues affecting her vocals, but fans only seem to remember her SNL debacle.
Simpson learned “the power of my no,” but it took a while to get there. “I think having to find at a young age that strength to be like, ‘I am good at this, and I will keep going, and I will keep fighting,’” Simpson added. She went on to perform on SNL again in October 2005 without a hitch, but her sky-high career suffered a setback with the 2004 appearance. Simpson shied away from her musical talents over the years, but she’s promising to celebrate the 20th anniversary of her first album this year because it’s filled with bangers that need to be heard again.
Before you go, click here for more documentaries about strong women in music.
