Ashlee Simpson
The younger Simpson sister got her own MTV show, a number-one debut album, and a top-five hit in "Pieces of Me" inside one summer in 2004. Then came October 23 on Saturday Night Live, when the wrong backing track played, she did a little jig and walked off, and one bad night followed her for the rest of the decade.
Ashlee Simpson was 19 and two seasons into playing Cecilia on 7th Heaven when MTV built a show around her next move. The Ashlee Simpson Show premiered June 16, 2004, in the slot right after her sister Jessica's Newlyweds, and followed her from signing with Geffen through recording her debut; Geffen's president later said there was "no question that it really helped expose her and her music." The lead single, "Pieces of Me," written with Kara DioGuardi and John Shanks about her relationship with Ryan Cabrera, premiered on TRL in May, hit number one on the countdown on August 4, and stayed on it into mid-September. It peaked at number five on the Hot 100 that September and topped Billboard's Pop Airplay chart. Autobiography arrived July 20, 2004, debuted at number one with 398,000 copies, the year's best-selling debut by a female artist, and passed 2.5 million US copies by January.
Then SNL. On October 23, 2004, she sang "Pieces of Me" live for her first number. For the second, "Autobiography," the pre-recorded "Pieces of Me" vocal came through the speakers instead, and, caught, she did an awkward hoedown and left the stage. She had agreed to use a backing track as support because, she said, acid reflux had inflamed her vocal cords; at the closing credits she blamed the band for playing the wrong song. Lorne Michaels said he had not known about the track and would not have allowed it. In January 2005 the Orange Bowl halftime crowd booed her "La La." Her own verdict, later: "I made a complete fool of myself."
The career survived it better than the reputation did. I Am Me (October 2005) also debuted at number one, went platinum, and gave her a top-twenty hit in "Boyfriend"; she played Roxie Hart in Chicago in the West End in the fall of 2006 and on Broadway in 2009–10. Bittersweet World (April 2008) opened at number four and became her last album for Geffen; a month later she married Fall Out Boy's Pete Wentz, and their son was born that November. The song, meanwhile, aged well: Billboard put "Pieces of Me" on its list of the century's greatest choruses, and Rolling Stone ranked it among the 250 best songs of the 21st century in 2025.
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