As Ellen DeGeneres has many musical guest performances on her talk show, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, many viewers often wonder whether Ellen has any musical talent herself, like being able to sing or play an instrument.
While Ellen DeGeneres has not received any formal training, she can sing. It is hard to tell what her real musical abilities are, as she often makes a joke out of her performances, but it seems like Ellen can hold a tune.
Read more below to find out what musical talents Ellen does have.
Ellen’s Musical Background
The Ellen DeGeneres Show is undeniably successful and well-known. It has won 61 Daytime Emmy Awards and 17 People’s Choice Awards. The talk show’s YouTube channel is also in the top 20 most-subscribed YouTube channels. Similarly, the show has 16 seasons, all with over 150 episodes each. All that being said, Ellen has had a lot of segments and a lot of musical guests over the last 17 years. In a lot of her episodes, she can be seen and heard singing either by herself for a game like “finish the lyrics” or with her guests.
Ellen often sings in a joking manner, but fans have said despite this, she can carry a tune. Ellen has received no musical training and has grown up only pursuing comedy, so she is not a formal singer. She may not even say she can sing, but she does put in a lot of effort and seems to enjoy doing it.
She may not have had formal singing training, but she jokes on the show that she has impressive guitar skills. In a segment on the show, Ellen tells her audience that she is going to impress them with her guitar skills. She then brings out the game Guitar Hero and plays a song. In a similar vein, to introduce Slash, the lead guitarist of the band Guns N’ Roses, Ellen plays the guitar.
She jokingly strums it a few times before he comes out and she joins him by trying to play and sing. Again, it’s hard to tell what her real abilities are as she tends to only play instruments or sings in a joking manner.
Musical Guests
As mentioned before, with the success of The Ellen Degeneres Show, there have been plenty of musical guests. There have been over a hundred performances alone and hundreds of other musicians who just sit down and talk to Ellen. Ellen has also gotten up herself to sing with some of her guests. She has a segment on the show called ‘5 second rule’ where the host says a category like trees and the players have to name three things in the category like ‘pine, oak or evergreen’.
When she was playing this game with Cher, Ellen started to play Cher’s song If I Could Turn Back Time and began to sing along to it. This prompted Cher to join in as well.
Ellen also had a segment with Kristen Wiig, an actress and comedian on SNL, where they sang a song from the movie Frozen, called Let it Go. As both women are comedians, the song is sung in a joking way.
But, it is a hard song to sing in general because of its many high notes and Ellen and Kristen do seriously hit some of them. As Ellen has had many actual musical guests on her show, she compiled a list of her favorite performances. Some of the musicians she included are Bruno Mars, The Weeknd, Adele and Rihanna.
Ellen has obviously spent a lot of time talking to musicians and listening to their performances. Though this does not make her a singer herself and despite not having any professional training, Ellen can sing.