Def Leppard’s Joe Elliott Defends Taylor Swift Performance

Taylor Swift was a double winner at the CMT Music Awards this week, but her performance of 'Pour Some Sugar on Me' with Def Leppard didn't win everyone over.

According to Def Leppard lead singer Joe Elliott, while the live audience seemed to enjoy the collaboration, he was puzzled by critics who described Taylor's delivery of the song's first line as "breathless."

"What a lot of people don't know is she was up for five awards," Elliott tells Rolling Stone. "And about a minute before we started that song, she had just picked up an award. So, after she accepted the award, she had to run down the stairs, run back to her dressing room and change her clothes."

With Taylor racing back to the stage, Joe says the director had started counting down to the band's performance. "Literally, she's running up the ramp, trying to put her in-ear monitoring in and clip the pack to the back of her skirt, so she can try to sing this thing," he recalls. "She was really a busy girl that evening. All we had to do was watch, and then wander out and get ready to perform this song. People said she was a bit breathless on the first line, and that's why she was."

In spite of the criticism, the rocker says CMT informed him that the collaboration was the "most-watched part of the entire evening."

"We brought the house down in the building," he says. "The reaction was unbelievable. She's such a bundle of energy, and she's so easy to work [with]. She's been a fan since she was in the womb. Her parents are responsible for her Def Leppardness. They were big Leppard fans, so obviously, she's heard the records growing up, and rather than resent her parents' music, she's embraced it."

On Tuesday, the same day as the CMT Awards, the 'CMT Crossroads: Taylor Swift and Def Leppard' DVD landed in stores. Elliott says that even though the pairing was Taylor's idea, the band was enthusiastic about it from the start.

"When she made it plain, via some interview on an Internet site, that she wanted to work with us on 'Crossroads,' we made it plain we were available and ready to do it," he says. "We've never really had a problem, doing the cross-genre thing, dipping our toe into some other stuff. We haven't done it so much very often in public, but we'd worked in the past with a band called Hothouse Flowers, who are more of a traditional Irish band. Its fun to do, and it takes you off the beaten track. So working with people, whether it be Taylor or the Flowers, it just gets you out of your homogenized bubble, and expands your brain, expands your musical horizons, and it makes you appreciate what you do when you come back to the day job, if you like."