RuPaul's Drag Race star Acacia Forgot reacts to Bob the Drag Queen and Monét X Change's Sibling Watchery shade about her

True to her name, RuPaul's Drag Race season 17 star Acacia Forgot is about to pop up as a recurring vision in your mind’s eye as she strives to hit all the right notes in RuPaul’s heart in pursuit of a crown.

A music therapy major, the accomplished bluegrass and country singer-songwriter knows how to use rhythm and lyrics to achieve real results in human brainwaves across her soothing work with patients at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital. Acacia has left the more professional side of her affinity for music behind, though, and now explores — and exposes — matters of her own heart on stage.

“I had a guitar in my hand before I could even walk,” Acacia, who studied music in school after moving from California to North Dakota and comes from a family steeped in musical prowess, tells Entertainment Weekly. “Music is what gets me up in the morning. I just decided to fuse it with drag, writing music and performing, and that’s pretty much the only gigs I do.”

She prides herself on her musical talents, as she's spent years immersing herself in the craft both personally and professionally. Her assertion in her Meet the Queens video that a live-singing queen should win Drag Race, however, drew criticism from past winners Bob the Drag Queen and Monét X Change, who cited contestants like Jinkx Monsoon and Trixie Mattel as examples of singers who've won the show in the past. They then played a clip from one of Acacia's older songs during a December episode of Sibling Watchery, which made Bob laugh out loud.

When asked about the moment in EW's exclusive group interview with the season 17 cast (below), Acacia prompts her audience to listen to her newer material.

"We don't have to talk about it!" she says, laughing. "I did hear about that. They laughed at my face. Girl, she listened to my music and she started laughing. But, I will say, that's my old music and it's not my favorite, but you can stream my new music on Apple Music, Spotify, and it's a lot better and a lot more me!"

Back to Acacia's one-on-one interview, the entertainer clearly has a sense of humor about her abilities, as she makes it clear that, just because she can write tunes doesn’t mean she can, uh, move to them.

“I’m not the dancing diva. I can barely stand,” she jokes, despite packing live shows for 45-minute sets filled with live singing, comedic numbers, parodies, and original songs, too. Still, there’s hope: “I’m the side-step queen of the season,” she confirms.

Embracing such flaws is one of Acacia’s other endearing skills, and it’s rooted in the ups and downs of her life experience. She admits that, when she moved to North Dakota, she “was straight,” and was destined to “meet a nice woman, a Christian girl,” and move to a farm with her new spouse. That didn’t last long.

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“I was like, scratch that. Every year of my school I was like, how can I get more gay and more gay?” she recalls, now arriving at the answer after hitting all the right notes along the way: starring on RuPaul’s Drag Race.

RuPaul's Drag Race season 17 airs Fridays at 8 p.m. on MTV. Watch EW's full interview with Acacia at the top of this post.