Hey, everybody forgets the lyrics every now and then.
I’m always impressed by an artist’s ability to remember the words to all their own songs – much less somebody else’s. But Ella Langley admits that while she was out on tour with Morgan Wallen, she had trouble remembering the lyrics to one of his hits.
Ella opened for Morgan on his I’m the Problem Tour last year, and while she was on the road with him Morgan brought Ella out on stage to join him on his #1 hit “What I Want,” which is a duet with Canadian pop star Tate McRae on his I’m the Problem album.
The only problem (no pun intended) for Ella, though, was that she had trouble remembering the lyrics.
During her recent appearance on This Past Weekend with Theo Von, Ella admitted that the pressure of the moment (and the fact that there are a lot of words in that song) had her nervous to perform it with Morgan:
“When I did ‘What I Want’ with Morgan, I messed up the words almost every single time. I’ve never been so nervous to go out and do something. I just felt like I could throw up before I walked out there every time. I just could not remember those words.”
Ella says she practiced the song to herself for days, but couldn’t seem to get the words down by the time she took the stage. In fact, she had even shared video of herself writing the lyrics on her hand so she would be able to remember them on stage:
@ellalangleymusic1 The rain was an unpaid actor #madisonwi ♬ original sound – Ella Langley
And of course the pressure of performing it in a stadium with Morgan Wallen didn’t help:
“POV, you go through this tunnel, you know what I mean? And you’re playing in the stadium. It’s the most people you’ve ever been in front of. You’re walking out with Morgan Wallen, everything gets dark and there’s smoke everywhere and you got to walk out and I’m in pointy heels and there’s grates out there so you got to make sure you’re not falling down in those.
You get up and then, here you go, you get one shot at it.
There’s no practice, too. You get like one rehearsal, you go out there and it’s like, okay. But doing it in front of 80,000 people is different than 2:00 p.m. in the middle of the day.”
She admits that Morgan gave her some crap for messing up the lyrics to the song – at least until it he did it too one night while they were performing:
“What was awesome is the last time we did it is he came out and messed up the words. When he did that, I started to laugh so hard cause he was giving me so much shit about messing up the words.
He was just like, “You can’t come out here and mess this up again.” I was like, “I might. I really am scared that I might.”
And so the last night he did and it was like, he just immediately could never say another thing to me about messing up the words, you know.”
Ella says that Morgan jokes now that he messed up on purpose to make her feel better, but that looking at him in the moment it was “pure frustration that he could no longer talk shit about me for messing up the words.”
Bet Ella was thankful he messed that one up.
