THIS IS MANDY MOORE
The star gets personal
The year was 1999, and a 15-year-old singer named Mandy Moore was debuting the music video for her first single, ‘Candy’. In it she drove a lime green Volkswagen Beetle past perfectly manicured Los Angeles lawns while singing that she missed a cute boy … like candy. It was the kind of dangerously catchy bubblegum pop song that would soon land the future This Is Us actress on the cover of celebrity and music magazines and earn her the title ‘pop princess’ alongside the likes of Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera.
But over the past 20 years, she’s had time to reflect on her early music, and it gives her mixed feelings. “Sometimes I liked the songs, other times I said, ‘I don’t get this, but OK,’” she tells WHO. At least one thing she sang then still resonates: “Show me who you are.” At 35, she’s finally ready to do just that, on her new album Silver Landings, her first in 11 years. It’s a deeply personal project for Moore, one that dives into what it was like to find success before she was old enough to vote. Moore’s music career dates back to a basketball game where a girl roughly her age sang the national anthem.
Watching from the stands, Moore, around 11, had what she calls a “light bulb moment”.
“I didn’t know you could do that!” she recalls while sitting down with WHO at her LA local coffee shop. “So I begged my mum to record me singing a cappella, then she hand-delivered it [to the arena] with some cookies.” The baked goods successfully sweetened the deal, and she began singing the anthem at a handful of sporting events until a music producer heard her and immediately invited her to his studio.
She released So Real – a sugar rush of an album that blended innocent ballads with cheesy pop synths – when she was 15, and was soon opening for both NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, and being offered acting roles. By the age of 25, she had amassed multiple film credits and released six albums with no intention of slowing down.
But suddenly, the music stopped. Instead, Moore became best known for her on-screen work. In 2010 she voiced Rapunzel in Disney’s Tangled, the first of several voice overs in movies including Racing Stripes, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Tangled Ever After and Brother Bear 2. In 2016 she landed the role of Rebecca Pearson, the lovingly overbearing matriarch on the family comedy/drama This Is Us. It won her a Golden Globe nomination and a Screen Actors Guild prize for best ensemble cast, and has so far lasted four seasons. Her character sang, but Moore no longer did. It wasn’t clear why until February last year, when she gave an interview to The New York Times calling her ex-husband, musician Ryan
Adams, psychologically abusive and claiming that he blocked her ability to make new connections in the music industry (he has denied the allegations). Before she knew it, it had been a decade since she’d released a song. “I missed it,” she says.
But now she’s back making music, she’s determined this time will be different.
Now armed with a live band, she was ready for her sound to grow, much in the way that she has. A big part of that has been her husband, Taylor Goldsmith, who she married in 2018 and who has helped her write and produce the album. He says: “I find that so many people, when they have success at a young age, tend to want to stay in that space because that’s the sound and the version of themselves that the world approved of.
I think it’s so bold and impressive that she’s growing with her music. Her going out there and making a singersongwriter record is indicative of how confident the record is.”
On Silver Landings, she sings about her struggle to get back to music in ‘When I Wasn’t Watching’ (“My favourite version of me disappeared through longer days and shorter years”) and learning to put herself first in ‘Forgiveness’ (“I wanted to be good enough for you until I wasn’t good enough for me”). “To me it was like, ‘What’s the point of making this record if I’m not going to be honest?’” she says. “Selfishly, I need to come to terms with my own life and choices and find some catharsis. It’s really finding the silver linings in what has happened in the last 10 years of my life since I’ve made music.”
Sitting across from her, it’s easy to see the 15-year-old who arrived on the music scene more than 20 years ago. She still has a smile that can make anyone feel like she’s their best friend, and the kind of general optimism that’s expected of a teen but refreshing in an adult. And if her sparkly pink eye shadow says anything, it’s that she’s still Mandy; just a different Mandy.
“I needed to go through all that s--t to get to where I am today,” she says. “It informs everything.” But this isn’t an album about how rough life can be. That’s the opposite of what she wants to sing about.
“I wrote plenty of songs about some of the more tumultuous years, but I was hesitant to put anything out because this record was a means to go on the road again, and I don’t want to get on stage every night and sing about s--t that I don’t want to think about anymore. That is in the rear-view mirror. I am in the driver’s seat and I’m only looking forward.”
Just don’t expect to see her riding around in a lime green Beetle any time soon.•
“What’s the point if I’m not going to be honest?”