Music

Ingrid Andress will never sing the National Anthem again. “I’m sorry, America,” she says.
The 33-year-old country singer is referring to the disastrously disheveled, off-key rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” she delivered last July before the home-run derby at Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. The minute-and-a-half clip went viral, and not in a good way. It has drawn 2.5 million YouTube views and 2,500 comments, including this one: “Thank you Ingrid for helping my uncle out of his coma with this performance. When he heard your performance on the hospital TV, he woke up after 10 years and jumped out of the window.”

Publicly, Andress responded to the debacle with damage control, announcing in a statement that she had been “drunk” during the performance and immediately checked herself into a “facility.” She then disappeared until Feb. 28, when she performed the anthem for the second time, at Denver’s Ball Arena, before her home-state Colorado Avalanche beat the Minnesota Wild. The performance went much better this time.

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Privately, Andress spent the past eight months dealing with what she stops short of labeling “alcoholism” — although she went to rehab, worked through the experience through prolific songwriting, including “Footprints,” a low-key country single Warner Music Nashville released this week, and allowed herself “the space to process.” She realized during this reflection that splitting from her longtime boyfriend and manager last year affected her more than she had admitted to herself. And, rather than allowing herself to “grieve” these losses, she threw herself into work — and, yes, alcohol. 

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This was Andress’ combustible emotional state in the run-up to the All-Star Game. “I just kept plowing forward and that’s when I started losing track of how much I was drinking, not sleeping enough,” she says, in a phone interview from her Nashville home. “It took a significant moment, like botching the Anthem on a global level, for me to ask for help.”

Below, she unpacks that moment further, and how she’s responded in the eight months since.

What made you pick the Avs game as the venue for coming back and singing the National Anthem?

Growing up, the Avs were my team. I felt more comfortable in my home state and more at home. Why not go back there, where I feel the most centered and grounded?

How did the Avalanche respond to the idea? Were they at all put off by your history with the Anthem?

I’ve played shows in Colorado, and people know, “She can sing, and this was just an unfortunate happening of events that got captured and went viral.” They were excited, which helped my confidence a little bit.

Artists say the “Star-Spangled Banner” is a dangerously hard song to sing. 

It is a challenging song. It tricks everyone’s brain into thinking that anyone can sing it. When you actually look at the range of notes, it compliments no one’s voice. But as it turns out, not being intoxicated and singing it makes it very doable.

In addition to the negative feedback, how much did people respond with empathy?

In the heat of all the hate is when I received the most support and love from my peers and friends and people who care about me. I obviously have never been part of anything that publicly humiliating before. I was devastated, embarrassed, disappointed in myself. To have that support of people who’ve also been there — that really helped.

How much did you plunge into songwriting as therapy?

I did, later. Initially, I took the space to separate myself from, “Who am I as a human, separate from singing, separate from songwriting? How did I get to a point where I didn’t really care how I sang?” The first part of stepping away from it was getting back to life, being in Colorado, going snowboarding. Once I felt like myself again, I got back into writing and producing, and some of the songs I hadn’t listened to in months hit differently.

What was the rehab experience like?

Rehab was more of an emotional deep dive. Anything can be substance abuse. It’s not just alcohol, it’s gambling, it’s food, it’s sex, it’s anything we use to numb or not want to feel something. Rehab for me was understanding the “why.” And once you know why you do something, it gives you your power back. You realize you have a choice and you don’t have to use substances or items or whatever to numb yourself. Since then, I’ve been looking at everything so differently and I’m present and clear-headed.

How long was the rehab process?

I was there for a little over a month and I was in no rush to get back to the public. Honestly, I was scared to come back too soon, because everybody was so harsh and critical, and that’s not an easy thing to mentally come back from.

How accurate is it to use the word “alcoholism” for what you were dealing with in your rehab?

It was never called that — but obviously everyone’s level in their journey in how they got there varied so much. That was never really a discussion when I was there. It was more about the month leading up to that day [of the Anthem performance] than anything. 

What was that month like?

I made some pretty drastic changes all at once. I’ve only had one manager my whole career, and I had to let her go. Then a longterm boyfriend who lived with me — I said goodbye to him. All that happened within two weeks.

I took everyone’s advice, which is “keep it moving.” I felt like I couldn’t be sad because I was the one who parted ways with them. I didn’t give myself any space to grieve. It drastically changed who was around me every day of my life. Management is like a marriage. Then [losing] your boyfriend living with you is like losing your best friend. Two key people in my life were gone because I had made that decision. 

What else have you learned from this experience?

You should ask for help the moment you need it. Never wait until something terrible happens. I did not have the insight to do that in the months leading up to the anthem. I’m glad it did happen. I was going down a road that was unfamiliar, and I didn’t know where it was going to lead. I’m in such a better place now. I feel like I’m back to being myself.

Even as a child, singer-songwriter Caylee Hammack realized the power of storytelling. She grew up immersed in stories — whether from the adventures embedded in the songs of musical influences such as Dolly Parton and Kate Bush, or in the pages of Harlequin romance novels she read as a teen.

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“I remember in elementary school, I would charge my friends a dollar to tell [them] scary stories or mysteries,” she recalls to Billboard. “It got to the point where I was like, ‘I could build a business from this.’”

The Ellaville, Georgia native first tried to write her own book at age 13 and made another attempt a few years later, ultimately letting that hope go — or so she thought.

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“I just told myself, ‘This is never going to be something you can do,’” she says. “And I hate that little voice — that I actually listened to it — but I put that dream away.”

Instead, she made an impact relating her stories through song: releasing her debut country album If It Wasn’t For You in 2020, collaborating with Chris Stapleton on “Small-Town Hypocrite,” recording with Miranda Lambert as part of the ACM Award-winning musical event of the year “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” and picking up a pair of nominations for the ACM’s new female artist of the year.

But on her latest Capitol Nashville project, Bed of Roses, out today (March 7), Hammack fulfills that childhood dream.

Bed of Roses comes with a companion, a 240-page romance novel. Each book chapter corresponds to a song on the album, such as “No I Ain’t,” “The Pot & The Kettle” and “Bread & Butter.”

Sam, the protagonist in the book Bed of Roses, finds herself stuck in rural Homestead, Texas, after her vintage car breaks down. There she meets Jack, the owner of the only mechanic shop in Homestead. His grandmother offers Sam a place to stay in exchange for help in her flower shop. Sam agrees in a decision that opens her eyes to all the charms of the small town.

“What I wanted to do was hone in a woman listening to her intuition, listening to her gut, and wise women that have come before her and experienced the same things,” Hammack says. “Finding your own community–whether it’s people you’re related to or people that you’ve met along the way that feel as if they’re related to your soul. I just really wanted a romance novel that had a sturdy, steadfast building of love. I love the bad boy tropes, but I’ve loved him a little too much in real life. For once, I would like to have a story where you want to root for the good guy.”

Hammack co-authored the book with one of her long-time favorite writers, New York Times best-selling author Carolyn Brown, who has written more than 140 romance books, including Ladies Room, The Dove, and her most recent, The Party Line, which Hammack calls a favorite.

“We would work 8-10 hours a day or more, just going back and forth. I was a tennis player growing up and I think of it as the most beautiful, consistent volley of ideas and creative energy,” Hammack recalls.

Hammack says the songs on the album chronicle Sam’s story, but also Hammack’s own journey: “If you listen to the album top to bottom, you get my story, my progression through lessons and experiences in the past 10 years. If you listen to it backwards, from bottom to top, and you read the book, then you get [the book’s protagonist] Sam’s story.”

The album is filled with songs that delve into self-love and knowing one’s limits, such as “No I Ain’t.” “I just kind of wrote it from personal experience,” she says. “I wanted one song that I could sing back to myself, or that someone could sing to themselves, where if you’re not strong enough right now to make the decision to love yourself more, that this can be a mantra to choose what is best for you. ‘I’m putting barbed wire around my boundaries,’ meaning I’m going to protect myself.”

Hammack credits her team at UMG Nashville with setting the dual book-album project into motion, noting that the album’s songs were inspired by consistencies in the romance novel genre as a whole — and those songs then sparked the idea for the book itself.

“I had told my label how I had based different songs [on the album Bed of Roses] off romance novels, and the tropes and dynamics of them. I like when tropes are used well and cleverly, so I look at songs as books — there are certain rises and falls you have to hit. [The label executive] had been meeting with a literary agent. I think he misunderstood because he said that I had an idea for a romance novel. But when I heard that this literary agent wanted to meet with me and talk about this romance novel idea, I automatically started thinking of characters and the whole book just exploded in me.”

The digital version of the book Bed of Roses is available now, while physical copies of the book will be released in June. Hammack says that could be just the first in a series of books ahead.

“I have ideas sketched out for two different books coming off this book. I would love to continue the story of the families and the people related around the Bed of Roses. I love captivating people and taking them to another place, opening their mind a bit. That’s what you get to do with music, too. You get to comfort, you get to awaken people, you get to excite people, but you also get to just be a refuge for people if they’re heartbroken. I hope that’s what this album and book is.”