Mandy Moore – Mandy Moore’s second act
If Wild Hope feels like a series of diary entries, that’s because it pretty much is. It’s wistful and young, both hopelessly pretty and unapologetically raw, thanks in part to Moore’s then-fresh breakup with Braff.
“I was so hurt and so devastated and angry,” she says. “And [anger] was the only thing I knew how to immediately find. I didn’t have to dig very deep for that, and it’s funny, because it doesn’t ring as true for me anymore.”
Moore says she wrote a host of venomous breakup songs early in the album’s birthing process. “Nothing That You Are”, a harmony-heavy pop song suggestive of late-’70s Fleetwood Mac, is the only one that survived, though it may be just as well: Its key couplets — “In time you’ll fade/Into the nothing that you are…You were somebody else/I hope you burn in hell” (yes, really) — are a sledgehammer to the heart of her formerly angelic reputation.
Wild Hope is otherwise a gentle folk-pop album supplemented with fairly typical instrumental touches — strings, Mellotron, accordion. It doesn’t feel like the work of a former teen star. But thanks to Moore’s voice, which is polished and velvety and Broadway big, it doesn’t exactly feel like it was made by a straight-outta-the-coffeehouse folkie, either.
The of-a-piece numbers “Ladies’ Choice” (written with Yamagata) and “Looking Forward To Looking Back” (one of five collaborations with the Weepies) are simple, evocative songs about the agonies of letting go. “Extraordinary”, another Weepies co-write and the disc’s first single, feels like a statement of purpose: “I was a daydream/Quiet and unseen/I lived in stories but inside I kept a mystery…And now I’m ready to be/Extraordinary.”
The song may be the single best thing Moore has ever done, though there’s no guarantee the masses will ever hear it. Getting radio airplay has proven problematic. Top-40 stations want the old Mandy, when they want any Mandy at all. At the other end, many programmers at hipper alternative radio stations have rejected the song without hearing it, no doubt because of Moore’s teen-pop past.
Moore once thought it might be easier to release Wild Hope (which will be issued through EMI by The Firm, a new label run by her management company) under a band-name instead of her own. That she may be forever judged by something she did when she was very young — and not particularly successfully, or well — has not escaped her.
She likes to think that people will eventually come around. “I guess maybe to the outside world, which rightfully hasn’t been paying too, too much attention, they maybe see my first record and ‘Candy’ to this, and haven’t seen many of the intermediate steps,” she says carefully. “So to them it feels dramatic. That’s OK….Maybe the older I get and the more material I put out there, people will be inclined to forget about the old stuff.”
Could Moore’s first few records really have been that bad? When asked if there’s anything from her early catalogue that still holds up, there’s an uncharacteristically long pause. “I like ‘I Wanna Be With You’. It’s a really pretty pop song. Um…everything else, no.”
Moore is learning guitar in preparation for her next record, which she hopes to someday record with Alagia in Woodstock. First, though, she faces endless rounds of promotion both for Wild Hope and for Dedication, an indie comedy coming out in August — followed, she hopes, by her first real tour in the fall.
All of this means that the questions about her past life as a pop star, already asked and answered, endlessly, are really just beginning. If this bothers Moore, she’s polite enough, and steely enough, not to let on. It may just be that, after all this time, she realizes the value in being underestimated.
“I’m sure at the time [I started], if most people had asked, ‘Where do you see Mandy Moore in five years?’, they would’ve been like, ‘Well, back to wherever she came from,'” she says. “I’m sure that’s what most people thought. I’m glad I proved them wrong. There’s a little chutzpah in there somewhere, huh?”
ND contributing editor Allison Stewart is currently working on a book about music and politics, and playing with her dog. She can’t think of anything clever to say about herself.