When Reba McEntire visited The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon last month, house band The Roots had a very special walkout song in mind for the actress and country music icon.
Alas, The Roots’ co-founder Questlove says that they were “denied” permission to play the song he initially had in mind: The Lonely Island’s Reba-centric “Two Worlds Collide.”
The song, originally produced as a Digital Short for Saturday Night Live Season 35, features Andy Samberg singing about his love for Reba McEntire—fully unaware that the McEntire he knows is actually “a man who found a wig in a dumpster,” played by Kenan Thompson.
The Roots, who typically select a unique walkout song for each interview guest, aimed to play “Two Worlds Collide” when McEntire visited with Jimmy Fallon on December 2.
“Let me tell you something. I got denied permission to make that Reba’s walk-on song at The Tonight Show about five weeks ago,” Questlove explained on a new episode of The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast.
The Roots instead sang “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” for McEntire’s walkout, a nod to her hosting NBC’s Christmas in Rockefeller Center tree-lighting special (airing the following night).
Questlove didn’t specify from whom the denial was handed down—The Tonight Show’s producers, or McEntire’s team—but appeared to deny the latter. (LateNighter has reached out to The Tonight Show for comment on the nixed walk-on song.)
“Who denied?” Meyers asked. “Was it from Team Reba?”
“No, no,” Questlove responded, going on to explain that The Roots have occasionally raised red flags for their choice of other past walkout songs.
“Let’s just say that in my 16-, 17-year history of being at the show, my walk-on song choices sometimes [include] deep cuts,” he explained. “Sometimes it’s a total victory; I will get a good snark in there and you won’t know it. But we got busted a few times for ruffling some feathers—mainly from publicists that will be like, ‘Why did they choose that song?’”
Perhaps the most notable of those “busts” was when The Roots played Fishbone’s “Lyin’ Ass B*tch” as former congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s entrance music on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon in 2011. Fallon was forced to apologize when the internet caught on to the apparent dig, tweeting, “I’m honored that @michelebachmann was on our show yesterday and I’m so sorry about the intro mess. I really hope she comes back.”
Questlove issued his own apology, calling that choice a “tongue-in-cheek and spur of the moment decision,” adding, “the show was not aware of it and I feel bad if her feelings were hurt.”
Questlove pulling “Two Worlds Collide” out of his Rolodex of songs, though, is a markedly different situation, considering that the track doesn’t mock the actual Reba McEntire—and that the real Reba apparently approved of the song when it first aired on SNL.
“Maybe my favorite thing about [the short] is that Reba loved it,” Meyers recalled on another recent episode of his podcast with The Lonely Island, which recapped the short in-depth. Indeed, Thompson appeared alongside McEntire, in his Reba wardrobe and wig, on stage at the 2010 CMT Music Awards.
