Is it Saturday Night Live or Saturday Night Memorex?

I just saw something interesting on Saturday Night Live: The show came back from commercial to join musical guest Ashlee Simpson, who was starting her second performance of the night (although, unusually, she hadn't been introduced by the show's guest host, Jude Law). After a couple of lines, the volume of the vocal track faded out. She danced a little idiotic jig for a while, wandered around looking confused and embarrassed for a few seconds, then left the stage. Her band vamped for a few more seconds, and then the show abruptly cut back to commercial. Lip synching trouble?

Update: At the end of the show, she claimed the problem was that her band had started playing the wrong song. Could be. It's not like I can tell one Ashlee Simpson song from another.

Further Update:
Ashlee Simpson in a recent Lucky magazine interview:

LM: What are your takes on lip-synching?

AS: I'm totally against it and offended by it. I'm going out to let my real talent show, not to just stand there and dance around. Personally, I'd never lip-synch. It's just not me.

Well, then. That settles that. I guess I didn't see what I thought I did after all.

Or did I? You can see fans going nuts about this on her message board, the NBC message boards, or on the Saturday-night-live.com fansite forum, or you can read about it in the New York Daily News, but better yet, you can check out the video of the incident here. I should point out that the vocals seemed to catch her off-guard as they came on, as her microphone was down by her hip, and she quickly had to snap it up to her mouth.

Classy move for her to blame her band, though. By all accounts, they were indeed plugged in live and tried like hell to save her by switching over from the song they were supposed to be playing to the one whose vocals were actually broadcasting (apparently, the same one she'd "sung" in her first performance -- as I said, I can't tell them apart and didn't pay much attention to the first performance anyway).

I guess this is what SNL deserves for whoring itself out to push untalented prefab pop acts whose record labels are owned by the same parent company (Ashlee is on Geffen, which is owned by Vivendi/Universal, which merged with NBC last year). I hope Elton John throws another anti-lip-synching hissy-fit about this one.