Mandy Moore: Adult Entertainment
After a teen–pop debut, a bad breakup and two label battles, Hollywood sweetheart Mandy Moore is back as … a crunchy singer–songwriter? “This is my last chance,” she confesses.
By Meredith Kahn Rollins
Mandy Moore is standing in the middle of an art gallery in Chelsea, New York, gazing perplexedly at an enormous canvas. Understandably: It depicts nude people strung with IVs, monkeys in cages and a dying shark on the floor. It’s a gorgeous Saturday, and the place is packed with art–fiend hipsters and bespectacled aficionados, and nobody — literally nobody, not even a Japanese camera crew — is paying Moore the slightest mind. It’s not like she didn’t make an entrance, with her surprising height, her aura of celebrity perfection, her cascade of auburn hair and the whopping knee–high black cast she’s wearing on her right leg (the result of a fractured ankle), which hitches her walk with a dramatic limp. But the pop singer turned actress seems to have plunked down exactly in the center of her least–likely demographic.
Moore hunches her shoulders, uncomfortable–teenager style, and gimps into the second room of the gallery. Another crowd of serious people; again, no flicker of recognition. She seems to relax. And then she gets to the final room. There are four skinny African–American kids — boys, 13 or 14 years old, tops — clustered around an oil painting of a man’s naked torso and hairy groin. Moore stares at its companion piece, a portrait of a nude woman, and sighs, mystified, “I just don’t know the rules of art.” The kids start murmuring, conferring among themselves. As Moore turns and walks out, one of the kids trots out behind her, then yells, “Hey! You Mandy Moore?”
Everyone is weirdly still. Moore tucks her chin into her shoulder, half come–hither, half dying of embarrassment, and says, “Mm–hmm.” She hobbles out to the sidewalk, the kid in hot pursuit. He thrusts a piece of paper her way and asks for an autograph. With an enormous smile, she chirps, “Of course!” and signs it To Malcolm, Love Mandy, flourished with a big, script–y heart.
And here is the strange state of Mandy Moore, the most lovable of all the teen chicklets hatched in the late–’90s Orlando–based pop–music boom. Ask a grown–up, and they might have some inkling of who she is — didn’t I see that Diane Keaton bomb Because I Said So on an airplane? — but she’s not exactly in their mainstream. Ask anyone who was stuck in high school at the turn of the millennium and they can rattle off Moore’s most famous accomplishments: her MTV staples — the teensploitation breakthrough “Candy” and the treacly “I Wanna Be With You” — and her starring role as a tragic leukemia girl in the pubescent love story A Walk to Remember. But it’s the grown–ups whom Moore, 23, is setting her sights on now. It’s the grown–ups for whom she’s writing music. And it’s the grown–ups who will determine whether Mandy Moore is going to be a musical somebody — or just another pretty actress with a hobby.
Her new CD, the aptly titled Wild Hope, is a determinedly adult singer–songwriter record that evokes Lilith Fair more than TRL: strummy guitars, melancholic keyboards, gently rocking Americana drums, intense lyrics about breaking up and standing on your own two solid, womanly feet. It’s well–played, well–meaning, fair–trade–only–coffeehouse music, performed with a shy charm, and just about as far away as Moore can get from the bubblegum that made her famous.
The middle child of an airline–pilot dad and a former–journalist mom, Moore got her first recording deal at age 14, when a local FedEx employee heard her at an Orlando studio and sent her demo to his friend, an A&R rep for Epic. Her first album, So Real, was released in 1999, and she promptly began touring with fellow Floridian juggernauts ’N Sync and the Backstreet Boys. “I went straight from watching them on TRL to opening for them in front of 20,000 people,” she says with amazement. “I don’t know where that confidence came from — and I don’t know where it went.”
Moore was always the awkward–little–sister figure in the oversexed–teen–star pantheon. She didn’t have the breathy bustiness of a Jessica Simpson, the taut abs of a Britney Spears or the tiny, porny proportions of a Christina Aguilera. And yet in her first video, for “Candy,” she works the camera in a way that’s almost upsettingly suggestive, with heavy–lidded upward glances and a pout. She says, “It’s funny: I think that was my sexiest time, at 15 — my gawky body, swaying like a little stick figure. My most overtly sexy thing was the first one, right off the bat.” She makes a fake–sad face, pulling the sides of her mouth down. “And from there it was aaallll covered up.”
Over the past few years, Moore has made a habit of ostentatiously ragging on her teen output. “How accountable can you really be when you’re a kid in an adult world?” she asks. “There was no way they were going to give me any say over my music or my image at that point. But even at the time, I was like, ‘Oh, gosh, I really don’t like this song … ’”
After fulfilling her contract at Epic, following the release of the tepidly received Coverage — in which she earnestly tackled songs by critical darlings such as Todd Rundgren and Joan Armatrading — Moore signed with Warner Bros. in 2004. But the relationship soured over Moore’s new direction (including sessions with respected but little–known singer–songwriters Rachael Yamagata and Lori McKenna), and the two soon parted ways. In a stroke of luck, Moore’s breakup with Warner Bros. coincided with the launch of a music– distribution deal between her management company, The Firm, and EMI. So Moore went to work on even more material (she estimates she wrote about 30 songs in all; there are 12 on the CD). Perhaps the most productive collaboration was with the folk–pop duo the Weepies, who contributed five tracks to Wild Hope. The Weepies’ Deb Talan admits that “when Mandy first came to our house, it was a little odd. You see her picture everywhere, and here she is walking up the steps into our cabin, and we were both like, eeeeek!” Moore then settled on a producer, John Alagia, who has done albums with John Mayer, Liz Phair and Dave Matthews. “Given the music industry,” Alagia says, “it was brave of her to put herself out there this way.”
Moore doesn’t think she had much of a choice, in the end: “This is me, and these are my words, and this is my taste in music.” Yet she’s been around enough to know that being really, really passionate about something doesn’t mean the public will buy it. “I feel like in many ways this is my last chance to do a record on this level. If this doesn’t work, how many opportunities do I get?”
So she’s laid herself all out on the line. She says she suffered through a bout of depression that’s reflected in the album’s brooding vibe: “I just felt icky and blue. Everything was sort of tweaked, and there was this gradual slope down.” While she’s politely circumspect about what brought on her bad mood, it’s hard not to trace it back to the end of her two–year relationship with actor–director Zach Braff, thanks to lyrics like “I can think of a million ways you proved you weren’t the one” and, more pointedly, “I hope you burn in hell.” Moore makes a big deal of trying to keep the album’s villain a mystery — after all, she dated tennis hottie Andy Roddick, too — but it’s clear that she doesn’t harbor a lot of fondness for the Scrubs star. When asked if Braff’s famously indie taste in music had influenced her, she scrunches up her face and simulates barfing.
In truth, the last few years have been hit–and–miss for Moore, both romantic al ly and professionally. On the career front, she was praised for her mean–girl–for–Jesus role in Saved! and had a successful arc of episodes on Entourage. But both of her big–budget films, American Dreamz and Because I Said So, withered at the box office. Her next movie just might turn the streak around: the buzzed–about romantic comedy License to Wed, in which she stars as a bride–to–be opposite The Office’s John Krasinski and a newly sober Robin Williams.
On the dating front, she had a brief but public fling with former Nicole Richie fiancé DJ AM. “It was a nanosecond!” she yelps. (She’s now dating singer– songwriter Greg Laswell.) And a recent romantic blow was delivered years after the fact, when her teen sweetheart, the actor and diminutive lothario Wilmer Valderrama, told Howard Stern last year that he had taken Moore’s virginity and that it wasn’t “like warm apple pie.” Moore sighs heavily. “That’s not a fun thing to have said about you.” She and Valderrama have made peace, but she says, “Even now when I think about it, I’m like, Ugh — it’s pretty tacky.”
Of course, the weirdest thing about that whole incident is how counter it runs to the very authentic–seeming goofy–good–girl image that Moore has maintained throughout her career. “I’m OK with being quiet and boring,” she says. But this may also be the dilemma: Despite her recent spate of grown–up problems, she’s still seen as America’s sweet little sister. Which also, maybe, is why she’s so excited about the moody, worldly persona she’s putting out there on Wild Hope. Take the song “Gardenia,” for example. Here’s the chorus: “I’m the one who likes gardenia,” she sings, plaintively. “I’m the one who likes to make love on the floor.”
On the floor! “Maybe it’s because I started [in the industry] when I was 15,” she says, laughing. “Oh! Making love on the floor is so taboo!” She feigns horror, adorably. “I went from being a child to making love on the floor. There was no intermediate step.” Then she lowers her voice, as if promising that there’s a whole lot more to her that we have no idea about: “But there was in my real life, I guarantee it.”
Having lunch at the Grove with new boyfriend, musician Greg Laswell.
But I'm a little disappointed that now even Mandy has jumped on the wayfarers bandwagon.
