‘MUSIC IS IN ME’
Mandy Moore is living out her dreams once again
There was a time not too long ago when Mandy Moore thought the best part of her life might be behind her.
Though she once had dreams of being a serious singer-songwriter, she hadn’t made music in years. Her acting career, once thriving, had been left for dead. The unending rejection of an actor’s life had annihilated much of her spirit, and an unhappy marriage had taken care of the rest. She felt unseen. Disposable. She was past 30. She figured her time was up.
“I felt really lost for a while, and so crushed by any sort of lack of momentum,” says Moore, 35. Even dissecting her lost years, she’s as nice as everybody says and speaks with the animated cheerfulness of the theatre kid she once was.
Her years-long losing streak “had me questioning, am I cut out for any of this? Not like in a ‘woe is me’ sort of fashion, but has that chapter of my life really passed me by? Have I experienced this success and these thrilling moments, and now am I left to look for what I’m going to do with the rest of my life?”
Once good things started happening again, they happened quickly: She met her now-husband, Taylor Goldsmith, lead singer of the rock band Dawes. She was cast in the NBC drama This Is Us. And she began writing the songs that make up Silver Landings, her first album in more than a decade.
“There was no one beating down my door, saying, ‘Where’s the record?’” she says. “It’s been 11 years. The last few records I had out were not successful. But it’s in me. Music is in me. I have to sing, I have to be onstage.”
Moore was, quite famously, discovered by a FedEx delivery man who happened to hear her singing one day and passed on the tip to a connection at Epic Records. Unlike Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson, her newly minted peers, she hadn’t come up through the ranks, wasn’t a veteran of The Mickey Mouse Club or Star Search. She was 15, and being a pop star was her first real job.
Once the star-making machinery rumbled to life, there was no stopping it, even if Moore had known enough to want to try. She showed up at the studio when they told her to and tried hard to re-create the demos the adults made for her, even as she quietly doubted their taste level.
“Sometimes I really wrestled with songs,” she says. “I didn’t like Candy initially. I think I recorded it several times. But I remember thinking, I don’t connect to this song in a way I had with other songs that I was recording for that first album.”
She released three albums in 18 months and had a few modest hit singles circa 2000, including Candy and I Wanna Be With You. Moore opened tour dates for The Backstreet Boys but otherwise didn’t spend much time on the road. She was so bad at dancing, a key component of her job as a pop diva, that her label actually suggested she stop.
Moore spent years apologizing for her confectionery beginnings, at one point even promising to refund the money of anyone who bought her old albums (she can’t remember if anybody took her up on it).
On her new single, Fifteen, she faces her past head on for the first time, without judgment.
It’s a common theme threading through the album, the idea of making peace with the person you are and the person you were. “I love her,” Moore says of her teenage self.
“I had to come to find affection for her and recognize that I carry her around with me, and she’s the reason I’m here, and not just admonish her for the position that she was in at 15, singing those songs that she didn’t necessarily love.”
Although it didn’t seem like it back then, being in teen pop’s second tier proved fortunate. She was famous enough that people who were kids back then remember her with a vague fondness she can draw upon now as an adult. But she wasn’t so famous that anyone’s opinion of her was fixed, or that anyone in power particularly cared what she did.
Moore diversified early. She was, briefly, an MTV VJ and a fashion designer, and soon segued into acting. She played a cheerleader in The Princess Diaries, a doomed, virtuous teen in A Walk to Remember and a fundamentalist mean girl in Saved!
In 2003, she released Coverage, a covers album that re-envisioned songs from the likes of Joan Armatrading, XTC and Joni Mitchell. It was meant to serve as a bridge between her old career as a pop princess and her new one as a grown-up who really liked ’70s folk.
In 2007, she released Wild Hope, a confessional folk-pop album with a retro feel. She co-wrote every song on it with a small group of songwriters who included Rachael Yamagata and Lori McKenna.
Mike Viola, a songwriter and producer who once played in the band Candy Butchers, forged a similarly close bond with Moore over their shared love of Paul McCartney’s solo albums and Todd Rundgren, and collaborated on Moore’s next album, Amanda Leigh.
The slowdown in Moore’s music career happened to coincide with her 2009 marriage to singer-songwriter Ryan Adams, from whom she was separated in 2015 and divorced in 2016. She had a hard time finding any kind of traction as either in acting or music.
In a 2019 New York Times story, Moore came forward as one of several women accusing Adams of varying levels of harassment, psychological abuse and, in one case, inappropriate communication with an underage girl. Adams was reluctant to collaborate with her or to let anyone else do so, Moore said. He would tell her she wasn’t a true musician because she didn’t play an instrument, an accusation that haunted her for years.
Even now, as Moore discusses her marriage in minimal detail, she does so without ever mentioning Adams by name, although it’s clear enough who she means.
After she and Adams separated, Moore’s luck began to turn. She landed a role on This is Us as Rebecca Pearson. Its astounding success has made Moore, after more than half her life spent in show business, more famous than she has ever been. It has made everything that has happened since possible: her Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, even Silver Landings.
Before landing the series, Moore met Goldsmith after she fangirled Dawes on Instagram. They married in the fall of 2018. Watching Dawes perform live solidified her desire to perform again.
Moore wanted to make music with Goldsmith, but she still bore the scars of her years with Adams and her past life as a never-quitegood-enough pop star.
It took a few attempts before Moore felt comfortable enough to proceed.
“I was so scared,” she says. “I have my own full set of issues that I have to contend with when it comes to self-doubt . ... I don’t want him to think I suck. I don’t want him to feel like he’s obligated to work with me.”
“That’s hilarious,” says Goldsmith. “That sort of thinking would never even cross my mind. I want to be able to share anything and everything, and the idea of writing a song together is as cool as marriage can get.”
Even though she lost much of the valuable real estate of her 20s to forces she didn’t feel she could control, there is nothing about that time that she would change.
“I’m exactly where I should be, and I don’t want to negate that experience, because it made me the person I am today,” she says. “We all have our baggage and our trauma. It also led me to Taylor. It led me to This Is Us, it led me to knowing who I am, what I want, what I deserve. And on the opposite end, what I don’t want, what I don’t deserve. I never have to learn those lessons again.”