Nick Jonas said this week that a botched guitar solo at the 2016 Academy of Country Music Awards led him to see a therapist.
The youngest member of the pop sibling trio the Jonas Brothers discussed stage anxiety on the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard podcast Monday, recalling what he called the “tragic guitar solo debacle”.
Jonas was backing up Kelsea Ballerini on her song Peter Pan and he’d rehearsed, he said, for what seemed like a “million times”. He said was “feeling really confident about it.”
“I started off, it’s fine, and as I walked towards her, I just went completely blank and I hit a wrong note and blacked out, basically, and clocked that it was wrong and I couldn’t stop,” the “Jealous” singer said.
Jonas took a ribbing on social media and tried to shrug off the mishap as a “brain fart”. But the effects were long-lasting.
“In retrospect, I can kind of laugh about how big I thought it was. But it did travel more than I wish it would’ve, and it did cause me to go into therapy,” he said.
“To this day and [after] hours of unpacking it, I can’t really figure out exactly what happened, but I was rushed right into a car and right to a plane after it.
“And I looked at my manager, I was like, ‘I think that was bad’. I was in shock, kind of. And then it was like a really traumatic moment that shaped the pressure I put on myself to be perfect and to always be ‘on.’”
Jonas recalled other mishaps, like forgetting lyrics when he performed on Broadway in Annie Get Your Gun as a boy, but he called the CMA blunder “the worst moment”.
Here’s a longer look at it, beginning at 1:32:30:
The Jonas Brothers, who got back together in 2019, are set to tour extensively in August, September and October.