In case you haven't seen this, you'll get a kick out of it. Ashlee Simpson was the musical artist on Saturday Night Live this week, and they normally perform two tunes. First up, she did her song, "Pieces of Me." When she came on for the second tune, she was expecting to play "Autobiography," her new tune. But instead, you could hear the "guide vocal" track from "Pieces of Me." Whoops!
The band, trying their best to make it work, joins in with "Pieces of Me." Ashlee dances around for a while, then walks off stage. The band keeps going for a bit, but then SNL takes it to commercial.
Lots of folks are making this out to be about her lip-synching, but this is done all the time (the guide vocal track), especially on TV or other "live" performances. What really irks me is that she's blaming this on the band. "My band played the wrong song." No, the SNL audio guy cued up the wrong track, then the band did the best they could to go with the flow. Don't blame this on the band.
Here's a comment I found from an audio engineer:
Just chiming in as an audio engineer; While it is entirely possible that she lipsynced the entire first song, I'm with the other poster who suggested that they only had the vocal intro to the song sync'd so it would be a perfect pick up, then it fades out and she continues to sing live. We also do sample tracks for vocalists who have trouble hitting a high note in a song where we'll have that sampled and we just trigger the sample playback when the high note comes along.
That's what I think happened, and some audio enginner at SNL is probably going to be looking for a new job in the morning, for cueing up the wrong song intro. I can't say I blame Ashley, I mean singing the same song twice would be kind of stupid, so what do you do? The band did good to keep going, but they didn't really have a lot of other options.
Here's an article on
CNN.com.
And here is a site where you can
see the video.