Saturday Night Live: Why aren’t the Yeah Yeah Yeahs performing?

Saturday Night Live

There has been a surprise change for next week’s Saturday Night Live episode, which is being hosted by Elvis star Austin Butler. Now, there is a different musical guest on board!

During the episode tonight, we officially learned that Lizzo is coming back to the NBC show as musical guest — remember, she previously hosted not that long in the past. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs were originally booked as the guest for Butler’s episode, so what happened there? In a new post on Twitter, the band confirmed that they had to drop out due to Nick Zinner’s ongoing battle with pneumonia. They’ve said that the big goal is for a speedy recovery, and this is not the only engagement they’ve been forced to cancel.

We will say that Lizzo does bring the show a good bit of familiarity for their Christmas episode, and we do tend to imagine that we’ll get at least a Christmas song or two performed over the course of the 90 minutes. This is a really special episode to be the musical guest for, as we’ve seen some legendary performers in this spot before.

It’s a little bit of a surprise, honestly, that the Steve Martin / Martin Short episode was tonight rather than last week, given that often the show closes the calendar year with someone who is a little bit familiar to the program. Yet, the good thing about Butler is that he can sing, act, and hopefully will be game for just about anything.

After this episode, we do think we’re going to see the late-night sketch show on hiatus for a good while. Our hope is that come mid-January, we’re going to end up seeing it back again, and we’ll get some news on that soon. Hopefully, the originally-scheduled band will get a chance to return down the road.

Related Be sure to get some more news on Saturday Night Live right away

What do you think about Lizzo being the musical guest for this Saturday Night Live episode?

Be sure to let us know right now in the comments! Once you do that, stick around for some other updates moving forward. (Photo: NBC.)

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