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Ingrid Andress admits she was nervous when she appeared on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry this month. No wonder: It was her first time to sing on a stage after her drunken performance of the national anthem went viral last July and led to a month in rehab. Of course she wanted nothing to go wrong with this comeback.
But one verse into “Lady Like” while accompanying herself on piano, the 33-year-old artist abruptly stopped singing.
“Hold on,” she said, yanking off her right boot as she explained to the crowd that her high heel was interfering with her piano play. “I couldn’t hit the pedal!”
Days later, she’s lamenting the glitch to PEOPLE, annoyed that it occurred “the one time I’m coming back to redeem myself.”
Ah, well. Worse things could have happened.
“Truly! Worse things have happened!” Andress says with a hearty laugh — something that shows itself frequently now, eight months removed from the botched anthem that she calls “my worst nightmare come true.”
The Opry actually wasn’t Andress’ first stop as she re-enters public life. That was reserved for a Colorado Avalanche hockey game on Feb. 28, where she delivered a redemptive performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” This time she nailed it.
She calls that “the second anthem,” then corrects herself: “the last one.” After what she’s been through, she’s not about to tempt fate. “I’m never performing that song again — ever,” she says, her tart wit fully intact.
That chapter is closed, but it’s left her feeling vulnerable. The next chapter is beginning slowly. So far, Andress has released one new single, “Footprints,” her first new music in over a year, and she’s booked just two shows, in April in her home state of Colorado.
“I wanted to do some Colorado shows for my fans, just to ease back in,” she says. “I didn’t want to do like, ‘We’re back, baby!’ and pretend nothing’s changed. No, let’s start small and see how we feel.”
The performance at the Opry, where she’s appeared several times before, offered her a first sample, and she says, “It was really nice to be back in a familiar setting. The Opry is very welcoming, and everyone wants you to do well.”
Indeed, the reception was warm enough for her to risk a brief allusion to her viral moment. “I’m definitely not a perfect person — as we’ve all found out,” she playfully told the audience when she introduced “Footprints.” The comment evoked a ripple of sympathetic laughter.
Despite all the upheaval of the past year, Andress says, she still feels like “who I am, at my core, is still me.” What has changed is new healthful behaviors. Alcohol, she now understands, is a hindrance, not a help. Instead, she’s learning how to process her feelings rather than numb them, to take better steps to self-care.
Perhaps most important, she’s learning how to give herself grace when she makes mistakes. In therapy, she says, she realized that, growing up in a strict Christian household, she had somehow come to believe that making mistakes meant “I had failed as a human being.”
One reason she selected “Footprints” as her first single, she says, is that its lyrics mean something so different to her now than when she wrote them two years ago. Initially, she thought the tender ballad was presenting herself as a role model, encouraging her four siblings to successfully takes risks just as she had. But, she says, “It felt more meaningful for me to release it now when I feel like, ‘Hey, you can royally f— up and still keep going.”
“Footprints,” Ingrid Andress
Discovering that herself, during her time off, was crucial. “Resilience is probably one of the best superpowers I’ve been granted,” she says with obvious pride.
Andress says she deliberately chose to restart her public life, six months after rehab, only when she “got to a place of like, oh, I enjoy myself. I like who I am, separate from anything that I do.”
But at heart, she also knows her artistry is part of what defines her, and she remains passionate about her music. She admits she had a fleeting moment during her downtime when she thought about abandoning the stage and turning exclusively to songwriting, which is what brought her to Nashville over a decade ago.
“But then I remember how I got into being an artist,” she says, “and I’d probably just repeat the same thing, writing more personal songs that are more my story, and then I would not want other people to sing them. And then we’d be back to where we are now!”
Better, she’s decided, to focus on new ways to manage her life. That includes a fitness routine — tennis and yoga are go-to pursuits — and other healthful habits.
“Hydration and sleep and activity do wonders,” she says. “And cross-stitching … It’s very therapeutic.”
What about therapy itself?
“Once a week, baby!” she enthuses. “We’re keeping it moving.”
These days, life also means being single. “I would probably not know what to do with another romantic human at this point,” she says with a laugh.
Andress is adjusting to life without alcohol, as well, and she takes her guidance from the 12-step approach: “I am very much a ‘one day at a time’ person.”
She refuses to think of alcohol as the enemy. “You have to take ownership of the fact that you’re still choosing to do that to yourself,” she says. “So, to me, I don’t want to give that kind of power to anything. At the core of everyone’s substance abuse is a human struggle.”
Now that she’s on the other side of surviving her “worst fear,” Andress is finding so much of her music sounds different to her now. “Footprints” is hardly the only song with fresh meaning.
Her signature anthem, “Lady Like,” for example, has become less a proclamation of her power — and her flaws — and more a statement of fact: “At first, I was like, this is who I am, and hear me roar. Now when I sing it, it does resonate on such a deeper level because I feel even more comfortable saying it.”
Ingrid Andress, “Good Person”
Several songs on her last album, 2022’s Good Person, also resonate differently to their maker. Of course Andress sees the irony in the title now, given the impression so many people were left with after that fateful day last July. But more significantly, she says she’s setting aside the question that she poses in the title song.
Is she a “good person”?
“Oh, I still don’t know what that means,” she says with a laugh.
Then she quiets to give herself a long moment’s thought. “I try to be, and I think at my core I am,” she says, but she adds, “I try not to look at things anymore based on good or bad. It’s just like, it is. It just is. And that opens up a whole other fun place to go with your brain.”
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