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WHEN
Mandy Moore steps out of her black Prius and bounds into
a tiny speck of a restaurant in Los Feliz, not a hipster
on the block flinches. Sure, her toffee bangs are
partially covering her eyes—but you’d expect someone
might make a correlation between the girl on the street
and the enormous photo of her plastered on a giant
billboard just a few yards away, towering over Vermont
Avenue.
But clad
in her flowy indigo Mayle dress and little yellow
sweater, the truth is that Moore, now 23, scarcely
resembles her former self. In 1999 she was a shell of a
15-year-old with wisps of honeycomb hair strategically
placed over her face, timidly staring out from the cover
of her first album, So Real.
That was
the Mandy Moore who hit the pop charts with “Candy,” the
catchy but empty single that branded her as just another
sugary tween act. The same Moore who, in her other
career as an actress, has appeared in a string of clean,
“aw, shucks!” movie roles.
“I find
it funny that people are like, ‘Wow, this is such a
departure for you,’” she says, curling into a red
banquette at her dinner selection, Café Figaro, and
discussing her fifth album, Wild Hope, the first
for which she’s written the songs herself. “For someone
to question the authenticity of where this record comes
from is kind of mind-boggling to me. I am 23 years old.
I think it should be acceptable that nine years after my
first record I’m doing something else musically.”
The
album isn’t as squeaky clean as her youthful following
might expect: “I’m the one who likes to make love on the
floor,” she sings in “Gardenia,” raising the question:
Will audiences accept a grown-up Mandy Moore?
“She’s
certainly weathered all sorts of idiotic criticism about
being too wholesome or bubble-gum,” says Ken Kwapis,
director of License to Wed, which also casts
Moore in a more mature light. The romantic comedy, due
on July 3, costars Robin Williams and The Office’s
John Krasinski. In Dedication, hailed at Sundance
and arriving in theaters later this summer, Moore plays
opposite Billy Crudup.
“She’s
finding herself in public in a graceful way,” Kwapis
adds.
When she
lets you in,
Moore reminds you of your best friend’s cool older sister.
The one you’re actually hoping to hang out with; the one
who sneaks in during your sleepovers to explain the
intricacies of French kissing. She’s consistently
reassuring and scarily kind, to the point where you
question why exactly she’s being so nice to her younger
sister’s dorky best friend.
Moore seems to view herself the same way, as a curious
nerd—dismissing anyone’s interest in her as unwarranted.
Instead, she focuses her attention on a list of the
dozens of things she is “ob-sess-ed” with: salmon (“I
ate it for all three meals the other day”); hanging at
Hollywood’s divey Hotel Café; and the peculiar phrase
“Man alive!”
One
fascination recently has taken top billing among her
obsessions: A 1920s house veiled by the Catskill
Mountains where she spent two months last fall recording
Wild Hope.
“I’d get
up, drive my rent-a-car down to
Woodstock
to drink coffee and read the paper alone at this café,”
the New Hampshire-born, Orlando, Florida-reared singer
gushes, the pace of her speech accelerating. “Then I’d
take these secluded drives in the mountains. It was
ideal.”
And why
not? Last autumn marked the first time Moore could
assume the musical control she’d relinquished going back
to “Candy.”
“She was
definitely No. 4 in the pop world. It was Britney,
Christina, Jessica and then little Mandy,” says Jon
Leshay, who has managed Moore since she was 14. “She was
the one who didn’t know how to walk in heels and wasn’t
going to wear a rhinestone bustier.”
Moore shakes her head just at the mention of those days.
Told that “Candy” wasn’t half bad—a song that spent 20
weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100—she grimaces.
“In my
heart of hearts, I do feel bad about that time,” she
says, cutting into a delicate platter of sautéed
scallops over legumes. “But who was I to tell a record
label at 15 years old, like, ‘I don’t think this is the
best direction for me?’”
As she
grew older,
Moore found it more difficult to keep mum when she was offered
uninspiring tunes. Her label, Epic Records, begrudgingly
obliged her whims and released her third album
Coverage in
2003, in
which she recorded favorite songs from the ’70s by acts
such as Elton John and Carole King.
After
scant promotion for the album, however, Moore moved from
Epic to Warner Bros./Sire, where she immediately made it
known she was interested in songwriting. But when she
suggested the quirky cowriters she’d discovered on
iTunes—among them indie girl Rachael Yamagata and folk
duo the Weepies—things began to go awry.
“They
were pitching the songwriters du jour,” she says. “Not
other artists, but professional songwriters who made me
feel like it was an obligation for them to sit down with
me.”
So when
Leshay suggested
Moore jump on the bandwagon of a new venture between his
entertainment talent management company, the Firm, and
EMI Records, she and Warners parted amicably. The new
deal allows
Moore to
split all revenue 50-50, simultaneously giving her that
coveted creative freedom.
“Each
time we wrote, I’d be blown away by how honest and
ballsy she was,” says country musician Lori McKenna, who
cowrote three songs with her.
Wild
Hope
is her bid to join the earthy-crunchy singer-songwriters
she admires, and it carries the feeling of someone
coming to grips with her past. Her more organic-sounding
pop tunes are fueled by lyrics
Moore scribbled into her Moleskine journal, stories that
allow listeners to see the world through her rose-tinted
glasses and beyond, past what appears to have been a
severely broken heart.
“I hope
that people give her a fair shake because where she’s at
now is a very rich place,” says Steve Tannen, half of
the Weepies, another of her cowriters.
“Maybe
this record will sort of shift people’s perception of
me,” Moore says, biting her lip cautiously. “Or at least
the effort will be applauded. But I don’t even expect
that from people. I’m just happy and proud at the end of
the day. And I guess that’s all you can be, right?
That’s all you can hope for.” |
