A POP TRAILBLAZER LEAPS BACK ONTO THE MUSIC STAGE

Ashlee Simpson has fun readying for her Vegas residency as she looks back at her influential moves of 20 years ago

- MIKAEL WOOD

"I MISS performing and I miss music and I miss writing," says Simpson ahead of her Vegas shows.

Ashlee Simpson has a cold, and thank goodness for that. With three children ages 4 to 16, the singer and actor accepts the certainty that she'll come down with something every now and again.

“As you can hear, I'm getting through it,” she says slightly stuffily on a recent afternoon amid what she calls the “organized chaos” of her art-filled Encino home. “But it was good timing. Before the show? Look, I'll take it.”

Simpson, 40, is counting down the days until the opening this weekend of a new residency at the Venetian resort in Las Vegas — a return to the stage after a long stretch away from the pop music career she launched in the early 2000s as the rebellious younger sister of the teen-pop glamazon Jessica Simpson.

As exhaustively documented on MTV's “The Ashlee Simpson Show” — a spinoff of the trailblazing “Newlyweds” about Jessica’s marriage to Nick Lachey of 98 Degrees — Ashlee released her debut album, “Autobiography,” at age 19 in 2004, topping the Billboard 200 on her first try before watching it all seem to crash down around her when she was caught trying to lip-sync on "Saturday Night Live." (She later said that acid reflux had left her unable to sing.) Simpson released two more albums "I Am Me" in 2005 and the synthed-up "Bittersweet World" in 2008 then largely left music to concentrate on raising a family. In 2008, she and her then-husband, Pete Wentz of Fall Out Boy, welcomed a son; they divorced three years later, after which she married actor and musician Evan Ross, with whom she has a daughter and a son.

Yet while "life happened," as Simpson puts it, the serrated guitars and snottysweet vocals of her early music emerged as a key influence on younger artists making new connections between pop, rock and punk.