On This Devastating Ingrid Andress National Anthem Performance


UPDATE 1:09 pm CDT: Early Tuesday afternoon (7-16), Ingrid Andress gave the following explanation:

“I’m not gonna bulls*** y’all, I was drunk last night. I’m checking myself into a facility today to get the help I need. That was not me last night. I apologize to MLB, all the fans, and this country I love so much for that rendition. I’ll let y’all know how rehab is I hear it’s super fun. xo, Ingrid.”

Read the full original story below:

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Once again, country music is embarrassed on a national stage, and specifically through a sports event. If you want to know why there is such a strange nexus between sports writers and the rabid fandom of folks like Sturgill Simpson and Jason Isbell, this is part of the reason.

Ahead of Monday night’s Major League Baseball Home Run Derby, “country” singer Ingrid Andress was tapped to sing the National Anthem. Though it’s easy to get swept up in recency bias, it’s certainly fair to characterize it as one of the worst National Anthem performances in history. It will also likely be devastating for Ingrid’s career, fair or not.

The first and fair question that needs to be asked is, why was Ingrid Andress given this opportunity in the first place, especially if she can’t even sing the song? Tuesday night’s All-Star game and Monday night’s Home Run Derby are being held in Arlington, Texas. Ingrid Andress is from Michigan, and doesn’t really have anything current she’s promoting. So why her?


Ingrid’s debut single “More Hearts Than Mine” was an auspicious start, and not a bad song at all. It was country pop with good writing and steel guitar in the background, which in 2019, was quite ambitious. It ended up going Double Platinum, and charting at #3 on country radio.

But ever since then, Ingrid has been chasing stardom with progressively worse singles including a collaboration with Sam Hunt, while also being pushed by the industry above her weight class as a performer. Appreciate that the woman you saw performing Monday evening has four Grammy nominations, including Best New Artist. Now think of all of your favorite independent artists that have zero.

But it’s not fair to characterize Ingrid Andress as a talent-less hack. Her performance was so bad, it almost defies explanation. Something had to be “off.” Some are surmising that she tried to do some cutesy wootsy version of the song, sort of like Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday” to JFK. You hear that in some of the phrasing.

Maybe it was a combination of factors, including just old-fashioned nerves getting the best of her. But this explanation offered up on Reddit by Grammy Award-winning audio engineer Chris “Tek” O’Ryan seems the most plausible.

“I specialize in vocal tuning and have tuned a lot of singers on ‘live’ TV going back 15 yrs or so,” O’Ryan says. “The reason this is so crazy is they have autotune on her but it’s in the wrong key.. so for some of it, she’s hitting the right note but the autotune is trying to pull it to another note. It’s a terrible idea to use autotune live on an acapella because there’s no pitch center to pull her back in key. And autotune shouldn’t be used anyway, when I tune a singer on TV I do it manually with Melodyne.”

Listening back through the performance with that in mind, you can definitely hear how that potentially could be the culprit. As Ingrid struggled to stay in pitch as Autotune was pulling her out of it, this could have made the entire thing a struggle. Why all of this wasn’t tested or debugged beforehand is hard to understand, but that’s the risk you run when relying on technology. A glitch can always send things haywire.

Perhaps even worse for Ingrid Andress, if it indeed was Autotune pushing her out of key, it’s hard for her to admit she was using that technological crutch in the first place, because people will judge her for it, similarly to if she was lip syncing.

Situations like these always get the peanut gallery of opinions going from people who probably couldn’t do much better singing a very difficult song a capella—well in this case, maybe they could. But this situation feels a bit more substantial than just a blown performance that goes viral. The more we rely on technology—whether it’s AI or Autotune—the more we see these embarrassing moments.

The sad truth is that a stellar version of the “Star Spangled Banner” can make a career. This is what happened for Reba McEntire and others. While some have lobbied for the tradition to be phased out, it actually presents a good avenue for exposure, especially for women of country music who rarely have those avenues presented to them via radio and other places.

Unfortunately for Ingrid Andress though, this wasn’t the kind of exposure she was looking for. Monday night exposed the lack of talent you’ve come to expect from major label country stars, when it could have exposed the talent of someone that could have knocked the National Anthem out of the park.

Update: Ingrid’s explanation doesn’t necessarily mean that Autotune or something else wasn’t in play, and her somewhat snarky ending seems to downplay the severity addiction can play in some people’s lives. Hopefully if she is suffering from addiction or alcoholism, she finds the help she needs.

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