Ingrid Andress Is Ready to Talk About the National Anthem: ‘My Worst Moment’
When Ingrid Andress sang the national anthem before a hockey game in Colorado last Friday, she was doing it to close a chapter of her career filled with shame, regret, and embarrassment. Seven months earlier in Texas, the country singer-songwriter spectacularly botched “The Star-Spangled Banner” before the MLB’s televised Home Run Derby.
She knows you saw it.
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“I am sorry you had to witness that horrific rendition of our nation’s anthem,” Andress says in her first interview since. “Whoever that was is not an accurate representation of who I am at all.”
“You got to see me in my worst moment,” she adds hopefully, “so now, everything from here will be great.”
That mid-July day in Dallas is somewhat of a blur for Andress. She arrived at the Texas Rangers’ ballpark, did a soundcheck, and started drinking. It wasn’t much different from her other gigs, where she was accustomed to downing beverages to numb some unresolved feelings before taking the stage. “Up until then, I had never let it get in the way of my performance,” she says. “I liked the numbness… That’s part of how it got out of control.”
But this time, what was most bizarre to Andress before the Home Run Derby, and a live audience of 40,000, was her indifference. “I just remember being like, ‘I don’t care,’” she says. “I felt so much like an object that it just didn’t matter. I had completely missed the plot.”
Within her first few notes, it was clear that Andress’ head was elsewhere. Her hair was messy, she was slurring her words, and she added off-tune vocal cracks and vibratos that quickly went viral on social media. By the end of the performance, Andress could be seen tilting her head down, wincing.
Andress isn’t here to explain the shouldas and couldas, but she says she was so drunk that day that she missed the note given to her in her in-ear monitor, which should have guided the 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,” she says. “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.”
Andress knew it wasn’t her best performance, but didn’t immediately realize how bad it actually was. “I remember talking to one of my best friends on the phone after I got off the field. She was like, ‘How’d it go?’ And I was like, ‘I think it went OK,’” Andress says.
The next morning her team tried shielding her from the online backlash, and she believed that maybe the video hadn’t spread as far as it did. But online, posts about her performance were inescapable. Describing herself as “hungover and disoriented,” she flew back to Nashville, where her team suggested she draft a comment.
“I didn’t run that statement by anybody,” she says. “I needed to let people know that it’s not just this one incident that I messed up. ‘I need to get better. I’m at such a low place, I’m not gonna lie about it.’” In her post, she added a dry-humor joke about how rehab might be “super fun.” Some thought it was flippant, and it added fuel to the online fire. “It was snarky of me, but I also wanted me to still come through in the statement,” Andress says. “I realize now how insensitive that came off.”
Within a few hours of posting the statement, Andress was already on another plane to a rehab facility (she declines to say where exactly, but that it wasn’t in Tennessee). She took her seat and silently sobbed away the shame of the performance and of admitting her alcoholism issues to herself and the world. At one point, a flight attendant tried to console her. “Don’t worry, sweetie. People are gonna forget,” Andress remembers her saying. To Andress, if the flight attendant knew what had happened on the field in Dallas, then surely everyone else did. “It broke my heart,” she says of seeing the reactions online. “I had to stop reading comments because I couldn’t handle how deeply it hurt.”
In retrospect, Andress understands why her performance became the focus of so much ire. Yes, it was bad, but the political climate in America was also tense. Just two days earlier, then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt at a rally in Pennsylvania; meanwhile, some Democrats were calling for President Biden to withdraw from the race. “I felt like America’s punching bag. I became a way to unite America. It was like, ‘At least we can all agree that this girl botched the anthem,’” Andress says. “I’ll be the punching bag for sure, but I didn’t commit a crime. It felt very extreme for what the situation was.”
At the treatment center, Andress had her phone taken away and went on to spend a little over a month working through her substance abuse issues. A few things came up in the process: Andress realized that since releasing her first album, 2020’s Lady Like, she’d been working nonstop. (“When things are going well for you, nobody checks in on you,” she says.) She also recognized some unresolved feelings about breaking up with her former manager, as well as a “significant other who was very serious about me.”
“It was a lot of big decisions made that in a short period altered my life drastically. I thought that changing that would fix everything, but it was so much to process,” Andress says. “There was a grieving period I never gave myself.”
According to Andress, she received a flurry of supportive messages from other women in country music, including Elle King, Kelsea Ballerini, and Little Big Town’s Karen Fairchild. “There was something about hearing from females in country that made me feel like, ‘I’m OK. I’ll be fine,’” she says. “We’ve learned to have each other’s backs.” She says she also heard from Carlos Santana, who was “so supportive” and suggested they work together.
“This stuff has happened to a lot of people who know exactly what I’m feeling right now,” Andress says. “It’s kind of a ‘Thank God’ moment, because we all do fuck up. But we all move on. And that’s part of this process.”
Andress emerged from rehab renewed, but admits she was far from ready to reenter the public eye. She spent the next six months living a quiet life in her native Colorado, removed from social media and the music industry. “I hadn’t had time to just live,” she says. “I wanted to view myself as a human and not as an artist. I wanted to figure out what I liked about myself separate from my songwriting.”
Now, Andress is energized, inspired, and unafraid of what reaction her music may receive. “Fear of failure? I’ve already been there,” she says. She hopes the people who discovered her through her worst moment take away that she can, in fact, sing and write songs.
This week, Andress released “Footprints,” her first single since the anthem uproar. She wrote the song for her siblings while she was on the cusp of her career, basking in Grammy nominations and an opening slot for Stevie Nicks. In the piano ballad, she offers her family advice based on her mistakes and offers her footprints should they choose to follow them.“I first wrote it on top of the mountain, but now listening to it while climbing up the mountain, it just hits much harder,” she says.
According to Andress, the new music she’s working on is less about love stories and more introspective, with a lot of questioning and self-acceptance. She says she’s learned to have empathy for the young woman who exposed her troubles on a national stage in July.
“I feel like I’ve gotten to know myself again, which is probably the biggest gift of all of it,” Andress says. “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.”
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