Ashlee Simpson shares the key lesson she learned from her 'SNL' lip-syncing controversy 20 years ago

Ashlee Simpson is looking back on her infamous lip-syncing incident on “Saturday Night Live” in 2004.

While appearing on the Feb. 19 episode of the “Broad Ideas With Rachel Bilson & Olivia Allen” podcast, Simpson looked back on the moment and said she had been dealing with vocal issues prior to the performance.

Simpson recalled starting to lose her voice and waking up the day of the show to discover she “couldn’t speak.” She also said she went to a voice doctor and found out she had “two nodules beating against each other.”

While she said her ability to sing had been thrown into jeopardy, Simpson now looks back with a deeper understanding of the need to stand her ground by not performing.

“The other thing is, learning as a woman, when you say no, or as an artist or a human or whatever, that day I said, ‘I will not go on, I don’t care. I can’t speak,’” she said. “Meanwhile, I’m not saying this. I’m writing it down, because I can’t talk.”

She said she was pushed to perform and knew trouble was on the horizon.

“'My band’s never practiced this, this is not going to go well. I can’t do this,'” she recalled thinking at the time.

“And I think that moment of having to do something, but then I think, looking back, I would go, ‘The power of my no and the power of me saying, "Absolutely not."' That’s what I would go back and say," she continued.

Still, Simpson said she learned a valuable lesson on "SNL" that night, when a prerecorded track of her singing "Pieces of Me" started to play as she stood on stage.

“I feel like it was a humbling moment for me,” she said. “I had the No. 1 song. It was, like, everything was about go somewhere and then it was just, like, ‘Whoa!’ The humility of not even understanding what grown ass people would say about you. Awful, awful things.”

“It was so hard to learn how to tune that out,” she added.

What happened to Ashlee Simpson on “Saturday Night Live”?

Simpson was the musical guest on the Oct. 23, 2004, episode of the sketch show. She performed her hit “Pieces of Me” without any incident before returning to the stage for her second song. After host Jude Law introduced her, music began playing and a prerecorded track of Simpson singing “Pieces of Me” began playing. She then did a jig as the band tried to play along with the track. A few moments later, Simpson walked off the stage.

How did Simpson initially explain what happened?

Simpson wasted no time addressing the snafu.

“I feel so bad. My band started playing the wrong song, and I didn’t know what to do, so I thought I’d do a hoedown. I’m sorry. Live TV. Things happen,” she said when she appeared with Law at the end of the episode.

Has Simpson commented on the controversy before?

Yes, the comments she made on the podcast echo what she’s said for a long time. While appearing on “Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen” in 2015, she was asked who was responsible for the “technical malfunction.”

“Me,” she said. “Me, completely. What happened there was I had a vocal problem. I had two nodes beating against each other and I woke up and I had no voice. And then I should’ve said, ‘No. I will not go on. I will not do this.’”

She also called it "the most humbling experience of my life" on her E! show, "Ashlee+Evan" in 2018

Did Simpson ever return to 'Saturday Night Live'?

Call it an epilogue to the story, but Simpson did indeed go back, performing in October 2005.

“I went back to ‘SNL’ with my second album, and I can’t find it anywhere. I’ve searched and searched for that performance,” she said on “Broad Ideas.”

“I was really nervous when I was on there and I can’t find it anywhere,” she added.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com