Mandy Moore admits she never felt quite on the same level as her fellow 2000s pop stars like Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, and Jessica Simpson.
During her appearance on the July 17 episode of Not Gonna Lie with Kylie Kelce, the singer and actress opened up about her 1999 debut single “Candy” and how it stacked up against her peers, who all dropped their first albums that same year.
When asked if she had a relationship or was friendly with any of them, Moore said their “paths didn’t really cross.”
“I feel like I was the youngest and the most boring out of the four of us,” she joked.
The A Walk to Remember star shared that she felt she “lucked out” being her label’s version of the rising pop stars of that era, but what set her apart was the creative freedom she was given.
“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.”
Moore mentioned she “maybe ran into Jessica Simpson a few times,” but when it came to Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera, she said they were in “an echelon unto themselves.”
“I would never have been able to like cross paths with them,” she said. “They were like superstars. I was just a little 15-year-old doing my own thing.”
Still, Moore says today’s pop fans can’t fully grasp the level of fame those stars held in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
“It’s hard to really explain because I feel like social media and the world we live in now, it’s so diluted,” she said. “We have access to anyone and everyone that we’re really curious about for the most part at all times.”
She laughed, admitting she sounded “super old” reflecting on Y2K-era pop culture, but emphasized it truly was a “different world.”
Moore released three pop albums by 2003 before shifting her sound to soft rock and folk. Her most recent album, In Real Life, dropped in 2022.
