Candy, 1999

Britney and Christina get the statues, the anniversary essays, the serious cultural reassessments. The Spice Girls get the reunion tours. All of it deserved. But in 1999, while everyone else was filing their pop allegiances, there was another record I kept returning to that nobody around me seemed to care about at all.

So Real, the debut album from Mandy Moore, came out when I was exactly the right age for it to lodge somewhere unreachable. I didn’t need to understand every word to know that "Candy" was structurally perfect, that "Walk Me Home" had something in it I couldn’t name, that "Lock Me in Your Heart" sounded like it should be bigger than it was. My friends were unmoved. I played it for them anyway, repeatedly, in the way you do when you’re young and haven’t yet accepted that taste is not transferable.

She kept making records. I Wanna Be with You, then a self-titled album, then Coverage—a covers record I thought was brave and that most people seemed to find baffling. The final one, Amanda Leigh, sold something like 17,000 copies in the US. Which is either a tragedy or just the market being honest about what it wanted from her.

What it wanted, apparently, was an actress. She became one—a very good one, eventually—and that was probably the right call professionally. But I still put "Candy" on sometimes and feel something specific and a little embarrassing, the way you do with music that reached you before you had any defenses against it. For me, Mandy Moore is the real pop princess. I stopped trying to convince anyone of this a long time ago.