When Ingrid Andress sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” before a pro hockey game in Denver earlier this month, it certainly counted as one of the most fraught renditions of the national anthem in our collective pop-culture history. Andress, one of the most acclaimed young singer-songwriters in country music this past decade, had made headlines last summer for doing a notoriously off-key version of the anthem prior to the MLB Home Run Derby. And suddenly, before a Colorado Avalanche game, with no advance warning, here she was, returning to the scene of the crime, figuratively speaking, to get a dramatic do-over.
It was a risk: As Andress tells Variety, she knew if she somehow flubbed it this time, there’d be no coming back from that for much of the public. But she had a lot going for her this time that didn’t have strictly to do with finding the right pitch… namely, sobriety. People tend to crack jokes and make hay when celebrities mess up America’s theme song, as has been the case with Fergie and so many others who fail to nail it, but Andress’ difficulties were no laughing matter, as she candidly admitted in a tweet soon after her rendition became a national news story that she had been drunk when she messed up. Therein was set up the possibility for the kind of redemption arc that America loves almost as much as a good shaming.
A few days after successfully pulling off the anthem in Denver, Andress sat down with Variety at her West Hollywood hotel to talk in detail about what was going wrong with the first “incident” … and what has gone right since she flew directly from the MLB debacle to a rehab facility. After seven months of undergoing the right kind of blackout — that is, staying completely out of sight of the public — she’s slowly but surely reintroducing herself, with steps back into the limelight like this past weekend’s appearance on the Grand Ole Opry and a tender new single just released by Warner Music, “Footprints.” Her third album will follow some time later this year. Andress has always been one of the more impressively self-analytical singer-songwriters coming up in the genre, and that’s likely to continue to be the case in the next record, as it is in this Q&A, where she frankly discusses what led to her alcohol dependency and the discoveries that helped her shake it off.
It was a pleasant surprise to see you back and doing the anthem to make your return into public life. As much as I tried to anticipate what your arc might be in terms of making a comeback, I didn’t actually foresee that genius move of picking up right where you left off.
Don’t get me wrong — I was terrified. When my team and I were first talking about it, I was like, “Well, I’m never singing it again,” and it was off the table. Then weeks went on and I thought about it more. I was like: No, I need to do this. I’m terrified to do it. And honestly, if I mess it up twice, it’s really hard coming back from that. You can’t mess it up two times in a row. So there was a lot weighing on it, but I’m really happy that I did that, because it feels like that chapter of my story has closed and I can move on and get back to songwriting and like back to who I feel like I really am.
How were you feeling when you were pulling off this re-do at the Avalanche game? There was a little bit of a chuckle in there at one point, and I wondered what that came out of.
So, the chuckle actually came from (feeling) the audience. The whole audience chimed in during the line “…that our flag was still there,” and they were being super-supportive. But they caught me off guard, because I didn’t know they all were gonna come in and sing that at that point. And it was a stress relief for me to be like, “Oh, they’re enjoying this.” Like, “I’m not ruining this.” And so it was this sense of relief and joy of being like: “OK, I can do this. And everyone here is with me, also singing it.” So it was a nice moment for me where I finally relaxed after that. And I know a lot of people have been saying, like, “Oh, she laughed during the anthem. How dare she?” I’m like, trust me, it was a positive thing. I’m not laughing at our country.
It was a nice touch that you had someone filming your rendition from behind you, who then followed you off the field to capture your response.
I didn’t know that she was gonna do that, but I’m glad she got that, too, because the relief was so visceral. I could feel the weight of all of it just kind of melting off. And when it was over, then I was like, “Now I’m never singing this song again.”
When your problematic version of the anthem went down last summer, along with the haters, you had a lot of good will behind you in the business and in fandom, as someone who people were rooting for, as opposed to someone whose rep made it so that people were just waiting for a chance to experience schadenfreude when you were in a spot of trouble.
It was nice to feel supported by the music community. I got an outpouring of texts after the incident, of people saying, “It sucks. This is part of the job that’s not fun, but you’re gonna get through it.” It was nice to receive that support from fellow artists and friends in general. And obviously there were a lot of people who were not OK with the situation. I took all of that to heart, and I realized how sensitive I was to people’s commentary. I’m just glad they took away my phone in rehab so that I didn’t have to read all of it. … My relationship with social media has changed a lot. I’m sure I’ll get back to it, because I do like interacting with my fans. But I am a very sensitive person when it comes to that, which I didn’t know about myself, because nothing like this has happened on such a large scale. This was my first taste of what it’s like to be America’s punching bag, if you will.
So when you came back and did the anthem at the Avalanche game last Friday night, you didn’t look at the reactions?
No. I mean, I’ve looked at a little, and I know that there’s a lot of positive, and there’s a lot of people still coming at me. But I’m at a point now where I’m just so happy and proud of myself that I got back out there and did it, it doesn’t really matter what anyone’s saying. Because I was more doing it to close that chapter in my life, to prove to myself that I could do it than to show everybody, like, “No, I actually can sing.” The Internet’s always gonna have opinions, but I am at a point now where I just enjoy doing what I’m doing regardless of what anyone says.
You waited a minute to do this.
I’ve been off the grid for a while, so it’s really just getting back into the world, reintegrating. … I definitely wanted to feel more ready. I realized that I hadn’t taken time off, really, since “Ladylike,” and I was really wanting to use this time to get to know myself and who I am now, as compared to when I started. So I took my time and hung out in Colorado and did a lot of hiking and outdoor activity and just got back to being who I am, separate from being an artist and a songwriter, and I just felt like a person finally. And now, I’m back (in the music game). But I still feel like a person!
Do you feel like you wouldn’t have allowed yourself to take any respite if it hadn’t been pretty much dictated through circumstance?
Yeah. I feel like the botching the anthem was the sign for me to be like, “Hey, we need to stop and figure out what’s going on.” Because I knew that I wasn’t in a good place, but I didn’t know what to do or who to talk to about it. I just didn’t know how to slow down because I’d never had to before. In a way I’m thankful it happened, because I feel so much more present now, and a lot happier. I feel like botching the anthem was necessary for me to reset my life and just my brain in general.
For people who know you and your work, it felt possible to imagine a future in which all of this ended up being a net positive for you in the long run, where it might not for some other people who end up being in that uncomfortable a situation, publicly. People think of you as being smart, having a sense of humor and being a good person, which are three qualities someone might innately need to be able to have a perspective of how to come back and be positive.
Thank you for saying that. I think a lot of people feel uncomfortable with talking about messing up, or needing help in rehab, and those are all taboo things which I feel like hiding from people makes it worse. So when I told everybody I was going to rehab, I could have very well not said anything to anybody, and just kind of disappeared and then come back. But I wanted to be honest with people and be like, yes, even people who seem to have it all together go through waves in life, and it’s OK to admit if you’re not in a good place, because that’s part of being human. So I definitely took that opportunity to lean into that… and to take the moment to have empathy for myself. Which took a second for me to have, because initially it was mostly guilt and shame and disappointment in myself. But I feel like now I can look back on it and be like, “Oh. We weren’t in a good place, but who I am as a human is defined by so much more than that.” I’ll probably make even more mistakes moving forward, but that’s part of the whole deal of being alive. So I’m just more gracious about making mistakes now, as opposed to thinking that they define you forever.
We don’t mean to ask you to relive that moment in length, but there are some differing takes on what might have been happening when you experienced that. I remember reading this detailed analysis from a pro audio engineer who said that you were clearly having an in-ear problem you couldn’t recover from, whatever else might’ve been happening with you personally. But then you came out with the blunt tweet saying, “I was drunk.”
So the truth about that is: I didn’t realize that they were planning on doing a (pitch correction) tuning thing. Because when we soundchecked, they didn’t have one. But if I wasn’t blackout-drunk, I would’ve been able to hear that pitch that they were giving me to start. So yes, I was basically fighting with the tuner the whole time. And so there are some parts where it’s very obvious that I’m just trying to find which key the whole thing was supposed to be in. But if I wasn’t that drunk, I would’ve been able to hear it; even if it was an audio issue, if I was within my right mind, I would’ve quickly corrected it. So it was a combination of the two.
But you didn’t fall back on the part of it that wasn’t your fault. You admitted to the part of it that was… which was a big part. Someone else might have been a lot more immediately defensive.
Yeah. I was so tired of trying to hide at that point. It was admitting to myself, too: “I need help with this.” Because I didn’t realize that it had gotten to a problem where it affected my work, because it really had never gotten that far before. So I just woke up and was like, “OK, that’s not me. I’ve never done that before. This must be really serious.” And yeah, it took that for me to get myself some help. The bluntness of it probably was jarring to a lot of people. Because I know a lot of celebrities just don’t say where they’re going or don’t admit to that; they just say, “We’ve been away for a while.” But I just felt like people need to know what’s going on. And I know a lot of people were like, “Oh, this is a publicity stunt.” And I was like, Really? Because I felt like I was being super vulnerable, yet even in that vulnerability, people were still so ready to not have empathy. So I think that was probably one of the more jarring things of the whole situation, realizing how much empathy people are lacking. Like, everyone has been through a hard time at some point in their life. And so just to see that come to the surface was really surprising to me as a human.
As far as what the problem was you needed to deal with, would you say it was a case of needing liquid courage when you were performing, or something bigger than that?
I mean, yes and no. I had recently gone through a lot of big personal life changes that I never really stopped to process. And it really was more about the weeks leading up to that day as opposed to just that day. I just was starting to enjoy the numbing feeling that I was getting by drinking more than I realized, I guess. And like anything can be abused as a substance, whether it’s like shopping, food, sex, gambling… We all numb out in some ways, and it just so happened to be alcohol for me. It had been like a couple weeks of not feeling like myself at all — or months.
You had recently been through a big management change, and then a personal relationship breakup. So was it like a personal/professional confluence of things happening to you, that accentuating the numbing?
Yes. It all happened pretty back to back. And I was the one that said goodbye to all these people, so I think that was the hard thing that I was wrestling with. It’s not like I had been broken up with; it’s not like I hadn’t been the one to say goodbye to these people. So in my mind I was like, “Well, I should be happier.” But it was still a really hard decision, and even though I knew I made the right decision, it still takes an emotional toll on you — and I wasn’t really ready for it to feel like that. I just kept moving and didn’t give myself space to grieve or think about it.
I was surprised to hear you say that on the night of the anthem, it didn’t register at first that it was such a big thing, and that it took a while for it to kick in.
I kind of knew a little bit, but no, not really. It was kind of like in and out of where I thought it went OK, but I also was like, “I could have sung it better” and then blah, blah, blah — I just didn’t care. I didn’t realize how bad it was until the next morning. I woke up with that pit in my stomach of like, “I fucked up and I need help.”
There is that sort of national pastime — and we do it in the media at least once a year, come Super Bowl time — of everybody ranking their lists of the best and worst prime-time national anthems of all time. There’s Fergie and Roseanne — and some other people who probably had thicker skins about it than you were able to have.
I made a joke to my team the other week. I was like, “I guess Fergie and I have to do a collab now.” Now I’m in that group of people — which now I can laugh about it, because I feel like I’ve worked on myself. I just feel so much better now, and I feel like after singing it again, I’m like, “OK, that happened. Time to move on.” But I would love to do a collab with her, and we can sing whatever she wants. And it can either be terrible or amazing, I don’t care.
There was something from your initial tweeted response that made me assured there was going to be a positive outcome for you. It was the sign-off to your statement where, after apologizing to MLB, the fans and the country, you signed off with, “I’ll let y’all know how rehab is I hear it’s super fun.” I thought, man, this is not a focus-grouped statement. This is for real and not something somebody cobbled together in the executive boardroom. And so I loved that candor and thought, “She’s gonna be OK.” But then there were other people who said, “Oh, she joked about rehab — she’s not taking it seriously.” I was like, “It’s called gallows humor, people.”
Exactly. As you know, that is very much my humor. I’d obviously never been to rehab. And I wrote it on the plane to rehab, where I was just like, “I need to say something that’s very still me, so that I’m not feeling like I’m just like walking away with my tail between my legs. No, I am admitting myself to rehab. No one’s dragging me here. I’m going so I am doing something to fix this. I’m doing something to take care of myself.” So part of me was battling those emotions, as opposed to the guilt and the shame and the embarrassment. So the mix of all of those things was what birthed that statement, which was just: I just want to be honest. So here’s what it is.
Being in rehab or doing any kind of recovery moment is a gradual process, and there’s not always a eureka moment. But was there anything you learned along the way that felt like a light bulb went on in your head, or marked a turning point for you in getting back to feeling like yourself?
Yeah, I think for me it was tackling why you choose to do things. Like, why do you want to do that, to cope with this thing? Once you look at it that way, it showed me: You have power in your choices. Things don’t have to just happen. You can decide how you want to deal with it moving forward.” There was something about being reminded of that. Because I feel like after being in the industry for a while, you sometimes lose perspective on what you have control over and what you don’t. So for me it was remembering: Hey, you get to make these choices for yourself, and what you do every day matters, even in the smallest of things.
And also, my fear of messing up or of people not liking me… that wound opened up entirely. It forced me to address that too, which is like: Why are you so afraid of what people think of you? Why do you fear judgment? I realized that a lot of that is from childhood. A lot of that is from what I was raised to believe, and I don’t have to choose to believe that anymore.” Once I realized that it was more my choice, it was a eureka moment of like, oh, it is my choice. It is my decision. Things aren’t just happening to me. I can make things happen for myself — not that I can control what happens around me or what others do or what others think, but I can control what I do.
One reason for someone to have faith that you would come through this fine is that prior to this you had two mature-feeling albums, and thoughtful interviews around them, that showed you have a history of using your songwriting to process personall lessons you’ve learned. Whereas we can think of some people who’ve had incidents, in country music specifically, whose art wouldn’t necessarily lead you to believe that they’re suddenly going to become sensitive to those issues or really work on themselves in a way that hasn’t shown up so much in their songwriting. Not that past performance guarantees future results.
Right. What was so interesting, too, about it is that I did feel very harshly judged for something that didn’t hurt anybody. I don’t know. I feel like there are a lot of country artists who have done worse things that actually gained fans from doing something drunk and disorderly. So that was another thing: I thought I was gonna be admitted into the cool kids’ club, but it turns out it’s like, “Nope, you are gonna now be America’s punching bag.” And you’re like, “OK, cool. I guess that’s just what happens.”
There are some double standards out there.
It appears so, but here we are doing it anyway.
When the anthem thing happened, you were about to release the first single from your next project at that time. Now you’ve just put out a different single than was going to come out then, “Footprints,” a few days after successfully singing the anthem. With your future music, are you resuming now what you were working on then, or was it more of a start-from-scratch situation?
It wasn’t a start from scratch. But I definitely wrote a little more and have rearranged some of the order in which I want songs to come out. Reemerging felt very vulnerable for me, so I wanted a vulnerable song about my siblings to come out first. It really goes back to the storytelling that I love so much, and just to remind myself and them, “I definitely have made so many mistakes, as you can see. But I also am still moving, and you can keep on going in life too, even if you make mistakes.” It’s a “please learn from my example and don’t do the things that I’ve done” kind of thing.
And I feel like being more vulnerable straight out of the gate is how I wanted to come back into this industry, because that’s just how I’m feeling. In all honesty, I’m not like feeling like, “I’m back, guys! I’m so ready!” I do feel that way internally, but it’s also a very vulnerable thing to come back out and really expose yourself again after such public scrutiny. So I just wanted the first thing back to feel real and meaningful to me.
“Footprints” is obviously very specifically about siblings, but does it have a larger emotional application for you?
Yeah, I think so. I mean, I wrote it about my siblings because I was the first one to leave our family dynamic to go off and pursue my dreams. It took everyone else a little longer to want to do that, and I didn’t want them to feel like I was leaving them behind, because we grew up so close, very homeschooled. So I wrote it for them just to encourage them, but yes, it can be applied to anybody that you’re trying to lead by example or just encourage to keep moving.
Are you the eldest of the siblings?
I’m the second-oldest. My older sister and I, we’re only 13 months apart, so we kind of are like Irish twins is what they say. The first to leave the nest, though. She and I are very opposite people. I got in the most trouble — like, I was grounded on my birthday three years in a row, so me leaving first was of no surprise to anybody in my family.
Your Colorado roots are a big part of your identity, so it made sense that you made your comeback at an Avalanche game in Denver. After you sing “Footprints” on the Opry this weekend, you have just two dates on your schedule at present, both of them shows in Colorado. And the snowy imagery in the promo art and your single’s cover definitely shouts Colorado.
Yes, I’ve spent a lot of time in Colorado since the incident. I just feel more at home there. I’m hiking or I’m swimming or doing stuff outdoors and being active. There’s sun all year round, and I went on a couple snowboarding trips and ski trips. That’s what I did growing up, and I just need to remember that about myself. Because there’s a lot of country in Colorado, and I grew up going to rodeos — and it is just different, Western, Colorado country. I’ve played some of my most fun country festivals out there too, and there’s a lot of ranching on the plains. I just needed that mountain air to get me back to feeling like myself again.
Where are you at with a full album?
I think we’re pretty close. I have not been idle these past seven months. Also, with taking space away from everything, I’ve felt more creatively aligned with where I want this next chapter to go. Whereas seven months ago, I was just in it, and we’re like, “Oh, we’re gonna launch again,” and I had no greater perspective of where I wanted it to go. … I wish I could share all of it. But I’m like, no, one thing at a time. I’m a very impatient person, mostly because I’m competitive and have a lot of energy. But I will say I’m glad I took the time and my team was like, “Let’s just make sure you feel good about the music first before we do anything.” and I’m glad I took this time to really hone in on that and also just be a happy human. It’s a good change of pace.
What’s on your agenda for the rest of the evening?
While it’s raining I’ll probably read for a good chunk of this evening right by the window and just get cozy. I’m reading “Women Who Run With Wolves.” It’s really interesting.
Is it making you feel like you’re a wolf-runner?
A little bit. It’s about that wild, innate thing that every woman has, which cultures from the beginning always embraced as a part of a bunch of rituals, and for some reason in our modern society, it’s just kind of gotten snubbed out. Actually, I’m not done with it yet, so we’ll see if I buy into it, but it’s making me feel ferocious in a way. Although I think I’m more of a fox than a wolf, maybe. I don’t think I’m a wolf yet — I don’t know. We’ll see.
