Moore pins 'Wild Hope' on folk-flavored songs

NEW YORK (Billboard) - On the evening of January 20, amid the riot of networking that is the

Sundance Film Festival, a pretty young folk singer named

Mandy Moore took to a makeshift stage at a private Park City, Utah, home and performed a set of low-key confessionals for a small audience of attentive listeners.

Buzzed on promotional booze, the crowd swayed in time to stories of love lost and confidence gained, and wondered perhaps why this impressive new talent had not been discovered by the world.

The answer, as anyone with a pop-cultural memory that stretches back farther than "Newlyweds" and K-Fed can tell you: She's been busy being Mandy Moore, the teen-pop tart who rode to stardom astride the sugar-high groove of "Candy," one of the genre's biggest hit singles. Never quite an equal of such jailbait glamazons as

Britney Spears and

Christina Aguilera, Moore nonetheless carved out a sizable niche for herself in the early-2000s teen-pop firmament by emphasizing her fresh-faced kid-sister qualities -- a job made easier by acting in feel-good fluff like "The Princess Diaries" and "A Walk to Remember." In those days of dime-a-dozen mini-divas, you didn't really mind having Moore around, but you did not really take her seriously, either.

Eight years after the release of her debut, people -- and not only the ones at Sundance -- are doing just that. As the majority of her teen-pop peers have drifted into creative irrelevance (or worse), Moore, 22, has improbably become one of the more credible singer/actors of her generation, slowly building a film resume peppered with quirky art-house flicks and making records more about singer/songwriter craft than high-gloss production flash.

PICKING UP THE PEN

Moore will release "Wild Hope," her first album of self-penned material, this year (it has a tentative April release date), and she's appearing in films that pair her with capital-A actors such as

Billy Crudup and

Diane Keaton.

"She's a tough, smart kid," says Paul Theroux, the "Six Feet Under" star who directed Moore in the upcoming romantic comedy "Dedication." "Even though she's beautiful and has this sort of angelic look, she's got some callused shoulders."

So how did this former teen-pop B-lister make it out of the land of lip gloss and double-entendres?

"I don't know," Moore says with a laugh over breakfast at a cozy organic-foods joint in West Hollywood. Stylishly casual in jeans and a loose blouse, Moore exudes the easy charm you'd expect of someone who has been glad-handing strangers since junior high. She listens with intensity, yet often says the first thing that pops into her head.

"I feel really lucky. It's so cliche, but I just wanna enjoy my life and have fun. And I've made the choices of doing what I thought would be fun and what I thought would be challenging."

Moore says of her teen-pop days, "I look back to that phase with really fond memories, but it also seems like a blur. I signed a record deal (with Epic) when I was 15, and I didn't really get a chance to stop and absorb it all until a couple of years later."

When she finally got the chance, Moore says, she discovered she "didn't feel supported artistically" at the label. Her musical tastes had changed during the years following "Candy," and she no longer felt satisfied being "sent into the studio with songs that my A&R guy would find."

COVERING OLD FAVES

Her solution -- and the first step in Moore's overall rebranding effort -- was 2003's "Coverage," on which she offered her versions of tunes by respected songwriters such as

Carole King,

Joni Mitchell and

Todd Rundgren.

"I just decided, 'OK, I understand the position I'm in, and I'm not going to necessarily get to do the type of record I want to make, so I have to sort of do it on my own.' So I found a producer, I found the repertoire, and I kind of paid for it by myself and just did it on my own time. I think Epic found out halfway through the recording process that that's what I was doing, and I guess they were OK with it. Then they heard it and they were like, 'Eh, we'll put it out."'

"Coverage" didn't sell well: Topping out just below 300,000, the album marked Moore's fourth consecutive sales dip, and the singer says it didn't exactly convince Epic that its relationship with her was one worth continuing. "Which was A-OK in my book," she says.

Around the time of the release of "Coverage," Moore began taking a series of film roles that skewered her goody-goody image. In "Saved!" (2004) she played a holier-than-thou church-school harridan, while in last year's "American Dreamz" she portrayed an ambitious pop-star wannabe willing to do anything to win an "Idol"-like singing competition.

"I never felt like it was a risky move," Moore says of the change in direction. "I was just shocked that the filmmakers wanted me to do roles like that with all these great people. I didn't really think about what people's reactions were going to be."

DIFFERENCE OF OPINION

Part of the reaction was a short-lived deal with Sire, the Warner Music Group imprint known for its early history as home to punk acts Talking Heads and the Ramones. Moore says she explained to the execs there exactly what sort of record she wanted to make.

"I wanted it to be very organic and live-sounding," she says. "I was adamant about wanting to get onstage with a band and just sing, without any gimmicks."

Still, conflict ensued. According to Moore, the label preferred that she work with "obvious" songwriters instead of the collaborators she had chosen, including smaller names like Lori McKenna and

Rachael Yamagata.

"Finally it was like, 'Let's call a spade a spade,"' Moore says. "You want a very different pop record than I want to make. So let's just go our two ways amicably and be done with it. And they agreed."

Warner, like Epic, her previous label, declined to comment.

"Bummed but not surprised" by her label dealings, Moore was open to an idea her longtime manager, Jon Leshay of the Firm, brought her: that she sign to the Firm Music, the new record company run by the star's Beverly Hills management company. The deal gives her 50% ownership of her records but leaves her with more of the responsibility for promoting her records.

"I don't know if the significance of having an actual label behind you really means anything to people anymore," she says. "People are discovering music on MySpace; they're watching videos on YouTube. I don't think you need that whole big machine behind you. And in this day and age, I'm happy to be a bit of a guinea pig."

Released under the name of some unknown singer/songwriter, "Wild Hope" would hardly seem like the object of such experimentation: Warm and tuneful, it's an appealing folk-pop confection likely to appeal to fans of

Norah Jones or

Michelle Branch or Corinne Bailey Rae. But it is a surprise coming from Moore, who says her goal for the record was creating "something that's completely relatable to as many people as possible, but also really organic."

"Mandy has a really young sensibility, but also a gravitas that's really surprising," says Steve Tannen of the Weepies, a Los Angeles duo with whom Moore wrote songs for "Wild Hope." "There's all sorts of challenges coming from where she came from. In a way, her celebrity works against her. I wouldn't want the world to have seen what I was doing when I was 15."

Moore seems untroubled by the challenge. "Not to sound bad, but I don't necessarily have to make a record," she says, scrunching up her face to offset her brass-tacks honesty. "No one's out there desperately waiting for my next album. I have so much fun doing film stuff, and I feel really fulfilled creatively doing that right now. So I have to do the music my way. It means too much to me. I can't just go into the studio and make a crappy pop record to please somebody else. Why bother?"

Reuters/Billboard