Jessica Simpson is back. The singer-turned-fashion mogul took the “American Idol” stage Sunday night to perform with one of the show’s eliminated contestants on a night when the Season 23 winner was crowned.
The “With You” singer passionately sang the new song “Blame Me” from her recent album “Nashville Canyon: Part 1.” The work is Simpson’s first new music in almost 17 years. She had performed publicly for the first time in almost as many years at SXSW in mid-March.
Then Simpson and eliminated contestant Josh King partnered on “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” a tune she covered 20 years ago on the “Dukes of Hazzard” movie soundtrack. Simpson played Daisy Duke in the 2005 movie reboot of the TV show, which ran from 1979 to 1985 and starred Tom Wopat and John Schneider, with Catherine Bach as the short-shorts-clad Daisy.
In addition to singing with Simpson, King played harmonica during the duet.
King made it to the show’s Top 8 after being saved by the judges when the Top 20 competed. When the public finally selected a winner, the choices had been narrowed to three: John Foster, Breanna Nix and Jamal Roberts. The crown went to Roberts in what host Ryan Seacrest called “the biggest vote in show history: about 26 million votes total, according to USA Today. Foster took second and Nix finished third on the long-running competition show, which ran on Fox from 2002 to 2016 before being picked up and revamped by ABC in 2018.
Roberts, a PE teacher who hails from Mississippi, rode to the top spot on the strength of performances including “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me).” The judges this season were Luke Bryan, Carrie Underwood and Lionel Richie.
During auditions, Bryan told Roberts (via People), “What I love about it is it was really like Southern soulfulness. Was it perfect? Was it flawless? No. But you’re not trying to sing it perfectly and flawless. You’re just singing it from the heart. And that’s what I felt.”
Underwood won Season 4 of the singing competition 20 years ago, then became a country superstar. Simpson, who became pop-star famous in the era of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, started making the crossover to country music in 2008 with the album “Do You Know.”
Then she stepped away from the spotlight, focused on her billion-dollar namesake lifestyle and clothing line, got sober and published a tell-all memoir, 2020’s “Open Book.”
Simpson released her first album since 2008 while she is going through a divorce from Eric Johnson, the former NFL player she married in 2014. The first single off “Nashville Canyon: Vol. 1” was “Use My Heart Against Me,” released in February. The full album dropped in March.
The singer, who shares three children with Johnson, was previously married to Nick Lachey of the boy band 98 Degrees. Those two had their own married-couple reality show, “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica,” that ran from 2003 to 2005 with a couple of spinoff specials along the way.
Simpson and Lachey divorced in 2005 after three years of marriage. Lachey married Vanessa Minnillo in 2011.
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