When Mandy Moore was a teenager living outside Orlando, Florida, she used to sing the national anthem at sporting events (frequently enough, by some counts, to earn her the unofficial title National Anthem Girl). Two local producers caught one of her performances and asked her if she wanted to record a demo.
In the studio, Moore was overheard by a Fed Ex employee who, as these things sometimes happen, had a friend who was an urban A&R rep for Epic. The rep flew down to Florida to listen to Moore, a self-proclaimed theater geek, perform some musical theater numbers. “I don’t think I understood the implications, like, ‘Huh, I might get a record deal,'” she says now. “I remember it was a Friday afternoon and it was the same day as my freshman high school homecoming game. And I was like, ‘Dude, I’ve gotta go meet my friends.’ As much as I wanted it, I don’t think I understood what it really meant.”
Moore signed to Epic a short time later. Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera were coming into fashion; she was positioned as a lower-budget, and decidedly more virginal, alternative. “I’m sure that was their idea, to look for the next big thing,” she says. “I didn’t care, though….They had no idea that I was as ambitious as I was.”
Her first record, the cleanly scrubbed pop confection So Real, came out in December 1999, when Moore was 15. It went platinum largely on the strength of the now infamous “Candy”, an oddly snack-obsessed hit with lyrics (“Your love’s as sweet as candy/I’ll be forever yours/Love always, Mandy”) that you couldn’t make up. She went on tour as the opening act for the Backstreet Boys, an experience she now remembers as “a big blur of glow sticks and bad dancing. It was great, but I don’t feel like it really gave me a lot of experience onstage that I carry with me now. If anything, I was super confident then. I’m too aware of everything now.”
Moore’s daily proximity to the Backstreet Boys earned her the enmity of teenage girls everywhere. “There was a lot of Mandy hating,” she says cheerfully. “I was like, I’m 15! I’m like [the group’s] kid sister, maybe. If they even talk to me.”
She released a remix disc, I Wanna Be With You, in 2000, and a similarly sugary self-titled album the next year, but neither met expectations, and Moore, a B+ teen-pop star in the waning days of the genre, slowly awakened to her predicament. She used to be happy just to make records at all, wasn’t picky — didn’t know she could be picky — about the details. But the older she got, the more she realized she didn’t like her albums very much.
“I wasn’t even sure what my musical preferences were,” she says. “I think as I got a little older and a little wiser and had traveled around a little bit, I was like, ‘Hmm. My musical tastes have changed now, and I’m not completely into what I’m doing, or at least I want to have a say, like, ‘No, I don’t want to record that song. I don’t want to work with that person.’ And it was there I realized I wasn’t afforded that opportunity.
“Somebody else was like, ‘No. This is the song you’re doing and this is the demo of it and you should learn it. You’re gonna be in the studio at ten on Tuesday to record it.’ It wasn’t like I was being held against my will, but I guess I realized the politics of the music industry early on, that the artist doesn’t have as much control as they would like to think.”
Moore’s lack of major success turned out to be a lucky break. If she had been better at being a pop star, she knows, she might have had to be one forever.
“I’ve been kind of an underdog [compared to] the people I came out around the same time as, and that worked to my benefit,” she observes. “At the time that Britney and Christina came out and were at the top of their game, I was like the weird little sister. But because I didn’t have the monumental success that they did, it allowed me to go off and do A Walk To Remember, and that put me in a different position.”
The 2002 film A Walk To Remember was Moore’s breakthrough role after years of smaller parts. Playing a minister’s daughter suffering from leukemia, she radiated good manners, quiet suffering and tolerance. She died in the end.
A string of middling romantic comedies followed, though none did brisk business. Moore’s relationship with Epic was simultaneously drawing to a close. Coverage, her last offering for the label, was an intriguing all-covers disc that surveyed artists ranging from Elton John to Joni Mitchell to Cat Stevens to Joe Jackson to the Waterboys to XTC to John Hiatt. Moore, whose childhood tastes ran more to Oklahoma! than to classic rock, was only nominally more involved in the recording of Coverage than she had been with her previous releases, but after years of making cheesy pop albums, it felt redemptive.
Coverage was the first of Moore’s albums not to go gold. It would be almost four years before she released another one. In the interim, she focused mostly on her film career, taking coolness-conferring roles in the HBO series “Entourage” and the low-budget black comedy Saved!
