That was a rough one.
Of course we’ve seen some incredible performances at the ACM Awards over the years. But there have been plenty of disasters too, from the Rascal Flatts lip-syncing debacle back in 2014 to some of the bizarre pop/country collabs the ACMs have been forcing on us in recent years.
And apparently this one was so bad that it sent one of the artists to therapy.
Back in 2016, Nick Jonas joined Kelsea Ballerini for a performance of her then-single “Peter Pan.” Why? Who knows. This was back when the ACM Awards invited even more pop artists and celebrities from outside of country music than they do now, so I guess in their mind it made sense to throw in a pop star made famous by the Disney Channel.
Well Jonas made his grand entrance during the song, and I’m sure organizers thought it was going to be one of the highlights of the show. This massive pop star bursts in with a killer guitar solo, the crowd goes wild, and 30 million people turn on their TVs all at once to see what everybody was talking about on social media.
But that’s not how it went. At all.
Jonas totally botched through the guitar solo, to the point that you had to feel bad for him as he grimaced and you saw the look of pain on his face. He knew it was bad, but he managed to power through.
The pop star would later call the moment a “brain fart,” but during a recent interview he opened up more on the awkward moment – revealing that it was so embarrassing for him that it actually sent him to therapy.
During an appearance on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast, Jonas explained what was going through his mind in the moment:
“Kelsea and I had a couple performances together, and this was one of them. I come out for my thing. I’ve rehearsed it a million times. I’m feeling really confident about it, not even really thinking about it like it’s a thing that’s going to be problematic.
I started off, it’s fine and as I sort of walked towards her, I just went completely blank and I hit a wrong note and blacked out basically and clocked that it was wrong and I couldn’t stop.
To this day and hours of unpacking it, I can’t really figure out exactly what happened, but I was rushed into a car, right to a plane right after and I looked at my manager and said, ‘I think that was bad.’ I was, like, in shock kinda. It was a really traumatic moment that shaped the pressure I put on myself to be perfect and to always be on.”
Yeah, I would probably want to get the heck out of there too.
Jonas admits that it was a traumatic moment for him, at a time when the Jonas Brothers were broken up and pursuing their own solo careers:
“In retrospect, I can kind of laugh about how big I thought it was. But it did travel more than I wish it would have, and it did cause me to go to therapy.”
Of course it’s live TV and these things happen. But man, to have it happen in a room full of musicians and singers…that’s gotta just make it that much worse.
There’s not any great video of the performance online (seems like they’ve done a pretty good job of getting it scrubbed from the internet), but if you’re a glutton for punishment, here’s the ill-fated performance from Jonas and Ballerini:
