Ashlee Simpson Reveals Why She Decided To Lip-Synch On ‘SNL’ 20 Years Ago, And It’s A Solid Excuse

2000s pop queen Ashlee Simpson reflected recently on her 2004 “Saturday Night Live ” lip-synch scandal and offered a pretty reasonable explanation as to why she decided to sing over a pre-recorded track.

Simpson said on Monday’s episode of the “Broad Ideas with Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen ” podcast that she was scheduled to appear on the variety show as a musical guest but realized soon after a rehearsal that something was terribly wrong.

“I was like, ’Oh s**t … I’m losing my f**king voice. What am I going to do?” Simpson recalled. “And the next morning I woke up and I couldn’t speak.”

Simpson said she immediately went to see a doctor and discovered she had “two nodules beating against each other.”

Simpson said she should have backed out of the gig, but was pressured into lip-synching two songs on the show by a label executive.

Simpson seamlessly synched her first song, “Pieces of Me.” But when she came back onstagelater on in the show to perform her second song, “Autobiography,” her band began playing the right instrumentals, butthe vocals played over the sound system were the opening lyrics of “Pieces of Me” — revealing the trick to the audience. Simpson did an awkward jig on stage as her band began to play “Pieces of Me,” but she eventually walked offstage and the show cut to commercial.

The former pop star, who was a bona fide “It girl” before the incident, received an onslaught of negative media attention afterwards.

“I feel like it was a humbling moment for me,” Simpson said. “I had the No. 1 song. It was like everything was about go 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.”

Simpson admitted that