Jessica Simpson’s “feet were sweating” during her live performance on American Idol.
The 44-year-old pop star performed on TV for the first time in 15 years, and after, confessed to feeling very nervous ahead of the appearance.
“Oh, my God, I was dying,” Simpson tells Extra.
“I can’t even tell you how long it’s been since I’ve been that nervous. Like, I had to put hairspray on my feet to stand still, like, not that it actually keeps me put, but, like, my feet were sweating.”
“I’m like, my feet don’t sweat.”
“I just kept telling myself, ‘Do not cry. Do not cry. I know this is a big moment … do not cry,’” she continues.
“And then I see my dad, like, up in the corner and I’m like, ‘Ah, I’m going to cry. I’m going to cry. Do not cry. Just sing your songs. Just sing your songs.'”
Simpson felt “very vulnerable” singing songs from Nashville Canyon, Part 1, the EP that she released in March.
“[15 years is] a really long time, and, like, the last time was a Christmas song, so that’s easy,” she explains.
“So, this is my new EP Nashville Canyon Part 1, I mean, part two comes in the summer, but it is so much a part of my soul, and so to sing a song off of that I felt naked, to be honest, like, it was very bare and raw and very vulnerable.”
She believes she’s reinvented herself as an artist with this comeback.
“It was really like I made a Spotify playlist of just music that I like, and it was not really any of the music that I’ve done before, because for me that was what people told me to do,” she says. “And I wanted to do something I was going to tell myself that I needed to do and felt right within my soul, so this playlist I would take into with songwriters and we’d sit there and they’d pick a song from the playlist and we’d kind of like vibe off of it.”
The 25 Best Country Songs of the Last 25 Years (2000-2024)
The best country songs of the last 25 years were felt and heard. Commercial impact was a factor, but emotional impact is what separates these songs from others released in the 2000s.
Technically the century began in 2001, but we reached back to 2000 to summarize this list of top songs. Alan Jackson is the only artist with two songs, but you’ll find 11 Entertainer of the Year winners scattered across a playlist the required several stunning exclusions.
Curious as to why your favorite song missed the cut? Well, there are only 25 spots for the best of 25,000 country song releases. Hard decisions needed to be made!
Gallery Credit: Billy Dukes
