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Mandy Moore is reflecting on her early pop music years.
On the July 17 episode of Kylie Kelce’s podcast Not Gonna Lie, Moore, 41, discussed her 1999 debut single “Candy.” That same year, her fellow pop stars Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera and Jessica Simpson also released their debut albums.
“I feel like I was the youngest and the most boring… out of the four of us,” Moore said, laughing. When asked if she ever met the other singers in her early career years, she replied: “I would never have been able to cross paths with them. They were, like, superstars. They were on this level of success that I’ve never known.”
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She added, “I was just like a little 15-year-old doing my own thing.”
The This Is Us alum said that she “lucked out” as her “label’s answer to them” while maintaining creative freedom to be herself.
“I was allowed to sort of make my own decisions even as a clueless 15-year-old,” Moore said. “Nobody told me how I needed to dress or how I needed to answer questions or what lane to sort of occupy or how to present myself to the world.”
She then reflected on how young listeners discover new musicians differently through social media in this era.
“[With] social media and the world we live in now, there’s so many more mediums I think to reach people now and not have to wait for a magazine interview or something,” Moore said. “It was such a different world back then.”
The A Walk to Remember star joked she sounded “super old” saying that, to which Kelce, 33, laughed.
Moore’s most recent album, In Real Life, was released in 2022.
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New episodes of Not Gonna Lie, an iHeart Radio podcast, drop weekly on Thursdays.
