Nick Jonas Says Performance with Kelsea Ballerini Sent Him to Therapy
Rick Diamond/ACM2016 Reading Time: 2 minutes
Pop singer Nick Jonas recently recalled his “tragic” country music awards performance with Kelsea Ballerini. According to him, such experience has caused him trauma and landed him in therapy.
Nick Jonas Revisits Infamous Off-Key Act with Kelsea Ballerini
In his latest guest appearance on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard Podcast, Jonas opened up about his embarrassing moment back in 2016 . The singer joined Ballerini to sing her rendition of “Peter Pan” at the Academy Country Music Awards.
“Kelsea and I had a couple performances together, and this was one of them,” he said. “I come out for my thing, I 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.”
At the time, Jonas had to do a solo guitar part. As recalled by the musician, he started his solo part as fine, but then he went “completely blank” and “hit a wrong note.” From there, Jonas blacked out and couldn’t stop making blunders.
“In retrospect, I can kind of laugh about how big I thought it was,” he said. “But it did travel more than I wish it would have, and it did cause me to go to therapy.”
As the “Jealous” singer described, he was “in shock” after the performance. For him, his ACM awards act was a traumatic moment that further magnified his self-inflicted pressure to be perfect.
He Says that It was His “Worst Moment”
Through time, Jonas stated that he has learned not to impose too much pressure on himself. Nonetheless, he considers that performance as his “worst moment.”
“Till this day and hours after unpacking it, I can’t really figure out exactly what happened, but I was rushed to a car and rushed to a plane right after it and I looked at my manager and said, ‘I think that was bad,’” he said.
At the time though, Jonas made it appear that he was poking fun at himself to ride people’s jokes online. Then, he admitted that he “screwed up” his solo out of a huge “brain fart.”
Despite such infamous performance, Ballerini didn’t think that Jonas failed in delivering their “Peter Pan” act. Back then, the country singer stated that singing with Jonas was “awesome.”
“It’s my favorite song I’ve gotten to release so far, and then to be able to share it with Nick — who is one of my favorite artists since I was like 12 — it was just super cool,” she said.
