Ashlee Simpson‘s career changed forever on October 23, 2004, when her musical performance on Saturday Night Live went completely and hopelessly wrong.
Simpson found herself in the middle of a live TV disaster when an incorrect lip sync track for her hit “Pieces of Me” started playing at the wrong time. The 7th Heaven star was understandably frazzled by the technical meltdown, so she responded in the only logical way… by doing a hoedown dance.
Nearly 21 years later, Saturday Night Live‘s production team lifted the lid on their backstage panic during Simpson’s botched performance as part of the new Peacock documentary Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music, which is codirected by Questlove of The Roots and Oz Rodriguez.
The documentary shows exclusive behind-the-scenes footage from the night and offers a definitive explanation for what exactly went wrong.
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SNL producer Marci Klein recalled in the Peacock special that she’d “heard rumblings that Ashlee had a sore throat and wasn’t feeling well” hours before the dress rehearsal, where the singer was due to test out both tracks.
“It was decreed that she would lipsync for the second song [in the live show] just to save her voice,” SNL music mixer Josiah Gluck confirmed. “Somehow, between dress and air, it was decreed that she would lip sync both songs.”
During the live show, Simpson got through her first song, “Pieces of Me,” without any noticeable trouble, but things quickly fell apart when host Jude Law introduced her second track, “Autobiography.”
Simpson’s band were drowned out by pre-recorded vocals from “Pieces of Me” playing even though the singer was holding the microphone at her side at the time. The lip sync track was silenced after a few seconds, but by that time, Simpson’s band had started to play “Pieces of Me” in hopes of covering up the mistake.
“I heard the director say something like, ‘Holy s—,’” Gluck remembered. “It was just like those old movies of two locomotives hitting each other, full bore.”
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On stage, Simpson started performing a hoedown-style dance for several seconds before Saturday Night Live mercifully cut away entirely. Among those watching from home in total confusion was future cast member Bowen Yang.
“I was in my basement, 13 years old [and] sexually confused because Jude Law was the host. In the moment of it happening, you weren’t really sure what was going on,” Yang said.
While Simpson wasn’t at fault at all for the technical error in her performance, she would later be criticized for wrongly blaming her band during SNL‘s Goodnights segment.
“My band started playing the wrong song and I didn’t know what to do so I thought I’d do a hoedown. I’m sorry,” she told SNL viewers with a shrug.
Years later, Simpson credited her SNL debacle with teaching her to be more assertive when she wasn’t comfortable.
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“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,’” Simpson confirmed during an appearance on the “Broad Ideas With Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen” podcast in March 2024.
Simpson revealed that she’d been diagnosed with “two nodules beating against each other” at the time, but ultimately agreed to go live on SNL because she feared the repercussions of canceling at the last minute.
“I feel like it was a humbling moment for me,” she admitted. “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 a– people would say about you, awful, awful things.”
Simpson eventually got a chance for a do-over when Saturday Night Live brought her back as musical guest on October 8, 2005. This time, her performances of “Catch Me When I Fall” and “Boyfriend” went off without a hitch.
Saturday Night Live 50th Anniversary Special airs on Sunday, February 16, with a red carpet special streaming live on Peacock from 7p.m ET and the live show airing on NBC at 8p.m. ET.
