In 2016, Nick Jonas attended the ACM Awards, where he infamously bungled a guitar solo while onstage performing a duet of “Peter Pan” with Kelsea Ballerini. Now, he’s looking back at that moment on Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast, where he talks about how that night sent him to therapy.
Describing that moment as a “really tragic guitar solo debacle,” Nick says: “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.”
Nick continues:
Kelsea and I had a couple performances together, and this was one of them. 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.
I started off, it was fine and as I 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.
Til 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. 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.
Listen to the full episode here.
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