They weren’t fooling anybody.
The ACM Awards are just two days away, and Rascal Flatts will once again be taking the stage (with the Backstreet Boys, for some reason) after recently reuniting from their extended hiatus.
Back in 2020, the band announced their farewell tour, which was later canceled due to COVID. And with lead singer Gary LeVox and bass player Jay DeMarcus pursuing solo careers, it seemed like a reunion was pretty unlikely. But last year, Rascal Flatts officially announced a comeback with their Life Is A Highway tour, and earlier this year they took the stage together for the first time since 2020 with a performance at President Donald Trump’s inaugural ball.
Needless to say, it’s been a few years since we’ve seen Rascal Flatts on an awards show. Some might say it’s been a nice break. Not that I’m saying it was good to not have to see them on awards shows, but some might…
Anyway, back in 2014, Rascal Flatts took the stage at the ACM Awards as one of the biggest names in country music.
Of course that’s not saying much, because country music really wasn’t in a great place at the time. I mean, just look at the 2014 ACM Awards. Two of the nominees for Album of the Year were Here’s To the Good Times by Florida Georgia Line and Crash My Party by Luke Bryan. Oh, and “Cruise” was also nominated for Single of the Year.
Yeah, not country music’s finest moment.
And at that year’s ACM Awards, Rascal Flatts also had another embarrassing moment for the genre when fans began to suspect that the group was lip-syncing during their performance of their then-current single “Rewind.”
Even fellow country artist Granger Smith took a shot at the performance – without calling the band out by name:
Well the next day they decided to address the controversy, admitting that yes, they were lip-syncing, and blaming it on their lead singer Gary LeVox losing his voice prior to the performance:
“After having performed several shows earlier in the week, Gary lost his voice. So, instead of canceling our commitment to do the show, we made a last minute decision to lip-sync. We’ve never done it before, and we’re obviously not very good at it. We look forward to singing live again in the very near future!”
And during an interview with the AP, Jay DeMarcus defended the lip syncing:
“I think half the people on the road touring right now use a lot of tracks and use a lot of vocals on tracks, and I think the whole thing is about presentation. Is it great to sing live whenever you can? Absolutely. But sometimes given the conditions and what’s happened prior to a show it is physically impossible sometimes to do, so we were faced with the decision to either cancel, which they had nothing to fill the time slot for, or keep our spot on a widely watched national televised awards show.”
LeVox then went on to blame it on his “Vegas throat,” saying that the band had played several shows in Las Vegas and that his throat was just too dry. But the band then went on to mock the outrage by having DeMarcus voice an apology for LeVox, so I’m not sure whether they really cared all that much about the people who were upset about it.
There’s not any great video of the performance online (I guess they didn’t want that one out there for people to “rewind”), but in the video that’s out there, you can see what they mean when they say they’re not very good at the whole lip-syncing thing.
Yeah, it was pretty bad.
