Warning: This story contains spoilers from the Wednesday, April 22, episode of The Masked Singer.
This is bananas! The latest singer to be unmasked on the competition show was none other than Bret Michaels — and it was quite a journey for him. Plus, the date his elimination aired on was quite a special one.
“April 22nd, 10 years ago was my brain hemorrhage. They were operating on my head, releasing the blood so I didn’t die and I’m singing ‘Knocking on Heaven’s Door’ at the exact same time they would be operating on my brain 10 years ago,” the Poison singer, 57, told Us Weekly exclusively following his elimination. “I had no idea these dates would line up. I feel really good celebrating the survival of being on the right side of the dirt.”
Michaels also knew the minute he saw Sharon Osbourne as the guest judge that his identity would no longer be a secret.
“We did The Apprentice together! She knows my every move, vocal move and I knew this was it. If you go on Reddit and all that, you can see that a lot of people thought it was me, but there were people saying no, so I was hanging onto that,” the singer told Us. “When I saw Sharon, I thought, ‘Damnit!’ My teenage daughters have been asking me to do the show and they were good about not telling their social media friends. But when Sharon is there, there’s no one telling her what to do!”
Additionally, Michaels, who has his first book, Bret Michaels: Auto-scrap-ography, coming out on May 12, revealed how he’s dealing with the current pandemic, joking that The Masked Singer was “ahead of its time” with masks and gloves.
“I am trying to stay mentally positive through all of this. I am in one of the highest risk categories for this, so I’m following all of the CDC guidelines for this,” he shared. “It’s about really staying mentally positive, knowing that there will be hope in the future. Well just like when I was 6 years old and I was diagnosed with a life-long disease and staying positive through all of that has helped me with this. I also have OCD, so that has helped me to clean out 1,000 things. I’ve opened up the engines of my motorcycles and gold carts. I’m just diving into projects and keeping my family positive.”
While he’s not binging Rock of Love reruns, he did reveal to Us that he’s still in touch with “a lot” of the old contestants.
“A lot of them still come out to shows, including Taya [Parker], Heather [Chadwell] and Farrah [Sinclair],” he said. “Most of them come out to the show, sometimes with a new husband or boyfriend. I just saw Lacey [Conner] in Vegas.”
The Masked Singer airs on Fox Wednesdays at 8 p.m. ET.
With reporting by Travis Cronin
