It’s been quite the 2026 for country music superstar Morgan Wallen, who wrapped up his massive stadium tour earlier this month.
Riding off the high of his continuously charting 2025 album by bringing the hit project to eleven cities across the U.S., per its name, the tour still had its fair share of problems. There’s no doubt the Sneedville natives’ 21 sold-out summer stops will go down as one of the biggest tours of the year, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t have a few kinks along the way.
Whether it was a twisted ankle, life-threatening weather, a few phones chucked across the stage, or the infamous piano-flipping incident, Wallen found himself the star of quite a few headlines. The latter drama-stirring moment, where he shoved his malfunctioning piano at his Denver, Colorado show in particular, earned him some less-than-ideal press.
While winding the night down with his acoustic set, leading into his 2021 fan-favorite, “Sand In My Boots,” Wallen’s piano ran into some issues, and apparently he could not hear the instrument while playing. He pivoted, letting his a cappella vocals shine for the Empower Field crowd.
But then he followed up the performance by walking back over to the wooden grand piano and flipping it over like an oversized toddler. Despite the internet bashing him the following morning over his dramatic behavior, he joked about it on social media in a video after the incident, showing off his electric keyboard and saying: “I just want you guys to know that right now this piano is working, that’s what they told me last night.”
Well, not to beat a dead horse, but the incident is still living rent-free in a lot of people’s minds, and the topic of conversation recently came back up on Wallen’s photographer’s podcast: In The Trenches With Spidey. Alongside his co-host and fellow photographer/videographer, Tanner Gallagher, Spidey welcomed to the show Wallen’s Creative Director, Justin Clough, who led the design on this year’s tour.
The guys all agreed that the situation had to be no doubt frustrating for Wallen, considering when you’re delivering a show to a crowd of 80,000 people, you can’t just get up and leave the stage if something’s not working. Spidey continued the conversation, asking, “What’s the real story? Is it he was trying to push the thing away and then he realized it tipped over?”
Clough says that apparently since the piano moves up and down via a lift on stage: “I think it was like he was moving it back onto the lift. I think it had moved off the lift, and then he just moved it.” Well, there ya have it folks…he just “moved it.”
I think the aggressive shove resulting in a piano crashing onto its side is a little more than just trying to rearrange the instrument back to where it belongs, but sure….likely story. Clough goes on to ensure that, luckily, the incident didn’t cause any damage to the expensive floor tiles at least (I’m not so sure about the state of that piano, though).
As for everyone waiting underneath the lift for the piano to drop back down, Clough says that the operating team was “freaking out. They thought the stage was collapsing.” He also notes that apparently Wallen walked off stage in a joking mood about the whole thing: “He wasn’t upset about it. Or I didn’t get the vibe that he was like upset at all. He came off stage like kind of laughing.”
Even HARDY joined in on the jokes, according to Spidey, who shared, “I remember HARDY texted him the next day, and he was like, ‘Hey man, my mom needs a piano moved tomorrow. I was wondering if you could come help.'” As for the trio of podcasters, they all agreed it was a rightful moment to be upset about and that people blew it way out of proportion, with Spidey and Clough noting: “If Morgan farts, weird people are going to talk about it” and “first time a rockstar has ever destroyed an instrument on stage? You know what I mean.”
They also both noted that, if nothing else, the “bad publicity” continues to propel Wallen into untouched territory as he remains the highest-certified country artist of all time and a cross-genre phenomenon. H*ll, here I am still talking about the incident more than three months later.
At least Wallen gets to put touring on the back burner for now as he prepares for an inevitable new era of music. It’s only a matter of time before he follows up his summer anthem “Been By Now” with a few fresh tracks for 2027.