Last summer, country pop singer Ingrid Andress delivered the rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner" heard 'round the world. Her performance at the MLB Home Run Derby was so widely mocked, in fact, that Andress admitted after the fact that she had been drunk for it and announced that she was checking herself into a rehab facility.
Now, the artist has given her first interview since the incident, reflecting on being so "blacked out" that she wasn't able to hear the note she was supposed to begin on in her in-ear monitors and how she's moving on from the viral butchering of her country's national anthem.
"I am sorry you had to witness that horrific rendition of our national anthem," Andress told Rolling Stone's Tomás Mier. "Whoever that was is not an accurate representation of who I am at all. You got to see me in my worst moment, so now, everything from here will be great."
She explained of the botched performance, "If I was not completely blacked out, I would have heard the pitch in my in-ear of where I was supposed to start. If you don't start on the note that it gives you, you're screwed. It was my voice fighting with the tuner, which is a losing battle."
Following online backlash to the performance, Andress's team suggested she draft a comment. "I didn't run that statement by anybody," she admitted. "I needed to let people know that it's not just this one incident that I messed up." The singer-songwriter added that a dry joke about how she hears that rehab is "super fun" fuelled the online fire, explaining, "It was snarky of me, but I also wanted me to still come through in the statement. I realize now how insensitive it came off."
Andress remembers the flight attendant on the way to the facility trying to console her as she sobbed, saying, "Don't worry, sweetie. People are gonna forget."
After a month in treatment (and an influx of supportive messages from other women in country music), she spent six months living in her native Colorado, removed from both social media and the music industry. "I wanted to view myself as a human and not as an artist," Andress explained.
"I feel like I've gotten to know myself again, which is probably the biggest gift of all of it," she continued. "I learned to not ever let your past dictate what you can do in the future. Sometimes it takes a little public humiliation to turn your life around."