Pieces of him.
A resurfaced unaired clip shows “Saturday Night Live” mastermind Lorne Michaels reacting to Ashlee Simpson’s infamous 2004 lip-sync disaster.
A recent episode of the “60 Minutes: A Second Look podcast” features never-before-heard audio from Michaels, Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Seth Meyers and Darrell Hammond during that episode, which aired Oct. 23, 2004.
That same week, “60 Minutes” was doing a feature on “SNL,” and they captured Michaels’ reaction.
“Oh, I think accidents happen. I think that’s the nature of live television… there’s things that you’re not in control of,” Michaels is heard telling journalist Lesley Stahl in response to the Simpson debacle in the clip.
During the incident, Simpson, the show’s musical guest, was outed for lip-syncing.
She had performed her famous song “Pieces of Me,” but when she came onstage to perform her second song, “Autobiography,” the wrong vocals played from the earlier song. Simpson reacted by panicking, dancing to try to cover it up and quickly walking off stage.
Simpson, 39, reflected on the fiasco in a February 2024 interview on the “Broad Ideas with Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen” podcast.
She said she “learned a lot” from the controversy, explaining that she had been 19 or 20 at the time.
“I wrote all these songs and I did all this and almost to have your credit completely taken from you and you’re like, ‘No,’” Simpson said.
According to the former pop star, she was scheduled to appear on the variety show as a musical guest but realized she could not perform because she had “two nodules beating against each other,” causing her to lose her voice.
Simpson said she told the show’s execs what was happening but was pressured by the higher-ups to sing her hit song “Pieces of Me” using a pre-recorded track.
“I feel like it was a humbling moment for me,” she continued. “I had the No. 1 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.”
She added that the incident, “It taught me humility, it taught me so much about myself and my own personal strength.”
Simpson, who has been married to Diana Ross’ son, Evan, since 2014 and shares two kids with him (and a third kid with her ex-husband, Fall Out Boy’s Pete Wentz), said that the professional setback taught her “how to get back up and go again. So there’s something about that too.”
In the podcast footage of Michaels reacting to the disaster, Stahl expressed surprise at how calm he seemed.
“It’s like the same way you’d feel if you’re a ballplayer and it’s rained out,” he explained.
“It really doesn’t have anything to do with you. You don’t control the rain. And I think in this case, it was much more ‘what just happened,’ which is, I think, what everybody else felt.”
He added, “And I was in the control room going, well, I mean there’s just egg out there now. I mean there was nothing to watch.”
When Stahl asked if Michaels thought the snafu hurt “SNL,” he said, “No, I don’t think the reputation of the show was hurt. No, I think it’s like, it happened, it was live, it kind of blew up. And lots of times that’s happened.”
After the journalist pointed out that some people thought Michaels orchestrated it and approved it to “pull one over on us,” he said, “Honestly, if I were to try and pull one over, it would be much more complicated than that.”
