Nick Jonas’ Guitar Fail on Live TV Landed Him in Therapy

Nick Jonas is sharing how his “worst moment” on stage during a duet with Kelsea Ballerini at the 2016 Academy of Country Music Awards led him to seek help in therapy. The 30-year-old musician recalled the “really tragic guitar solo debacle” during Monday’s episode of the Armchair Expert With Dax Shepard podcast. During the award show, the “Sucker” singer was set to perform Ballerini’s hit single “Peter Pan” off her debut record, The First Time.

“I come out for my thing. I rehearsed it a million times. I’m feeling really confident about it – not even really thinking about it like it’s a thing that’s going to be problematic,” he recalled of the performance. “I started off, it was 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.”

Jonas’ fumble made headlines immediately, with people on social media even going so far as create tutorials on how to play the wrong version of Ballerini’s song. “In retrospect, I can kind of laugh about how big I thought it was. But it did travel more than I wish it would have, and it did cause me to go to therapy,” Jonas told Dax Shepard.

At the time, the Jonas Brothers star also tried to laugh off the jokes made at his expense. “Just landed in London to all these posts from Sunday nights performance,” he tweeted at the time. “So funny. Yes, I screwed up the solo thanks to a huge brain fart.” He then shared fan-made sheet music of the incorrect version of the song, writing, “We’re all human and s-t happens sometimes, but whoever made this is a genius.”

Looking back years later, Jonas said he still “can’t really figure out exactly what happened” on stage, but remembered being rushed to a plane afterward. “I looked at my manager and said, ‘I think that was bad.’ I was, like, in shock kinda. It was a really traumatic moment that shaped the pressure I put on myself to be perfect and to always be on,” he remembered.

Ballerini never held Jonas’ flub against him either. “I’m a huge fan of him. I was a huge Jonas Brothers fan, unapologetically, when I was 12 or 13. His solo stuff is just incredible and it was really cool to collaborate with him on the awards. I’d totally do more with him if I could,” Ballerini told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “I thought, ‘If I mess up, he has me.’ It kind of eased my nerves a bit. He’s such a sweet dude. We’ve known each other for a year, so it wasn’t a weird, ‘Hey, I’m Kelsea. Hi, thanks for singing.’ It was a little more casual, which was good.”