Boy, that’s one nice dad Ashlee Simpson has.
On this season’s first two installments of MTV’s “The Ashlee Simpson Show,” it becomes clear that Simpson’s manager and father, Joe, was the one who made Ashlee sing to a backing track on “Saturday Night Live.”
At least that’s the impression given viewers of the pop starlet’s show.
“I was really scared, and I didn’t know what to do,” Ashlee said of the quite audible vocal “scratchiness” that cropped up the day of her “SNL” performance.
On that day, as her mother sits nearby, a doctor diagnoses Ashlee with severe vocal swelling, and Ashlee later said he told her that “I was going to ruin my vocal cords if I tried to sing on them.”
So what did her concerned father do? Cancel her appearance, citing vocal problems? Of course not.
“My dad was like, ‘I’m sorry, but you have to sing along to a backing track,’ ” Simpson said on her show.
And then when that decision went spectacularly awry and the wrong song was played, the one who had to explain and defend the use of the backing track was Joe’s 20-year-old daughter.
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
