Oprah Winfrey is owning one of her more unexpected creative detours, and she is not holding back.
On the July 21 episode of Keke Palmer's podcast Baby, This Is Keke Palmer, the 72-year-old media mogul revisited her 1998 gospel-style recording "Run On," which served as the theme song for season 13 of The Oprah Winfrey Show, and she didn’t hold back her embarrassment.
"I think I've got to run home. Girl, there it is. Stop! Girl! OK, that is one of the mistakes of my career," Winfrey said in a clip Palmer shared on Instagram.
When Palmer pushed back with "It's no mistake. We love it," Winfrey held firm. "It is a mistake," she replied.
The backstory behind the recording is equal parts spiritual and self-aware. Winfrey explained she was weighing whether to wrap up her talk show when a personal moment of faith pushed her to continue. "And then I had a little talk with Jesus, and Jesus said, 'You gotta keep going.' And so I said, 'You know, there's this song. It's an old spiritual,'" she recalled.
The song was released in 1998 as a single alongside its debut as the show's theme. To bolster the track, the production team brought in a choir. "And so then we thought, we could do it…We could do the whole church choir... Sometimes backup vocals will do that. Sometimes. Oh, yeah. Didn't work this time," Winfrey said.
She was equally candid about the core problem. "And then we realized, I can't sing, even though I took the singing lessons," she added. "It was bad. You know it was bad. You're just saying that because you're looking at me right now. It was bad. It was pretty bad."
The theme only lasted one season across the show's 25-year run from 1986 to 2011.
