We can thank this rendition of the National Anthem for bringing us together

Unless your name is Whitney Houston , “The Star Spangled Banner” isn’t a test singers can ace so much as a course they either pass or fail. It’s a famously tough song to sing (lots of high and low notes, a melody that doesn’t glide easily) in a grand, high-profile setting that incentivizes soaring bombast. When you get it right, your reward is a moment of rapturous applause that’s forgotten immediately once the main event kicks off.

And when you get it wrong…

With the caveat that there’s more than one way to biff the National Anthem — by now, most singers have learned from Roseanne Barr not to make a joke of the proceedings — the surest way to fail is to get overly ambitious and lose your grip on vocal control.

Which brings us to poor Ingrid Andress, whose performance in the lead-up to Major League Baseball’s Home Run Derby on Monday has gone viral in the worst way.

On most days, Andress has a lovely singing voice. She performed a charming Tiny Desk concert just last year, in case you’d like to see evidence that Andress can sing. (I was in the room! She can sing, and was also very nice!) But Ingrid Andress is not a belter ; her gifts lie in observation and conversation, and in getting at subtle truths without overstating them.

She is, in short, not the singer you book if you’re in the market for grandiosity. But even with that in mind, her “Star Spangled Banner” went off the rails quickly. There’s a way to tackle the song without getting too tricksy — to keep it subtle and contained — and it seemed for a second like Andress was following in that tradition.

But she soon began bending and curling her syllables in a hyper-stylized way, and that seemed to set off a chain reaction as she wandered farther and farther off pitch on her way into the power notes, where Andress didn’t so much seize the melody as throttle it until it stopped kicking.

It is, with apologies to Andress — who, I must reiterate, can sing — the exact, hilarious distraction the world needs right now. Much of the country is in the midst of truly awful weather, we’re more politically polarized than ever, wars rage around the world, someone just attempted to assassinate a former president, and the Olympics don’t start for another week and a half.

So let this moment tide us over, unite us in shared appreciation of the fact that at least it wasn’t us up there trying to sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” and let thoughts of baseball-adjacent mishaps send us down a rabbit hole of watching celebrities attempt to throw a pitch to home plate , only to fail spectacularly. After all, as in the song, bombs are how we know that the flag is still there.

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