Photo Courtesy of TODAY

Mandy Moore was four days away from a major musical comeback. She was about to hit the road for her first tour since 2007 when the pandemic shut the world down.

Amanda Leigh Moore, an award-winning singer, songwriter and actress best known for her role as Rebecca on NBC’s “This is Us,” had been making a name for herself in film and television for the past six years.

But she wanted more. 

 In January 2020, Moore announced that she would be releasing an album for the first time in over a decade. “Having music back in my life makes me feel like a more complete version of myself,” she wrote in an Instagram post.

A household name since 1999, her debut single Candy reached No. 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 when she was just 15 years old. Moore released six albums between 1999 and 2009, charting on the Billboard Hot 100 multiple times.

Then, something went awry.

In 2009, Moore married Ryan Adams, a well-known record producer and singer-songwriter, and her music production abruptly stopped for more than a decade. 

The couple seemed to split amicably in 2016, but three years later, The New York Times published an investigation about Adams, noting that a number of women had come forward saying he had physically and psychologically abused or harassed them, including Moore.

The Times piece reported that, in 2013, Adams began communicating with and sending sexually explicit messages and videos to Ava, a 14-year-old bass player. However, Adams denies any inappropriate contact with the girl.

Phoebe Bridgers, a singer-songwriter and musician, was also targeted by Adams in 2014, according to the Times. Adams and Bridgers began working together and creating music, with Adams assuring Bridgers that the music would be released and jumpstart her career.

Instead, “he began barraging her with texts, insisting that she prove her whereabouts or leave social situations to have phone sex, and threatening suicide if she didn’t reply immediately,” according to the article. Bridgers broke off the relationship and Adams refused to release the music that they had created together.

Moore spoke with reporters, telling her story for the first time. Both the cases involving Ava and Bridgers happened while Adams and Moore were still technically married (although, they may have been separated).  

“What you experience with him – the treatment, the destructive, manic sort of back and forth behavior – feels so exclusive,” Moore said in the article. “You feel like there’s no way other people have been treated like this.”

“Music was a point of control for him,” Moore said in the article. “His controlling behavior essentially did block my ability to make new connections in the industry during a very pivotal and potentially lucrative time – my entire mid-to-late 20s.”

Following the divorce, Moore was cast in a lead role on NBC’s “This is Us,” which is currently airing its final season.

“I think she is finally making the art that she wants to make on her own terms,” said Ilana Kaplan, a New York Times music writer who interviewed Moore following the release of “Silver Landings” – Moore’s much anticipated launch back into music.

Brad Nelson, a music critic and a fan of Mandy Moore’s, was hooked after listening to the first single from “Silver Landings.” “I had been waiting to hear another Mandy Moore record for ten years,” they said. “I feel like what she wrote about was feeling like you lost a period of your life and also feeling very close to that person you were in that lost period. It’s such a vulnerable and intimate portrait that also spins poetry out of this very traumatic experience.”

“Child stars are told who they are in the world and have to grow to fit into that kind of shape,” said Donna Rockwell, a licensed clinical psychologist and celebrity mental health expert. “They have to work doubly hard to define and accept for themselves an identity that they feel is enough, is authentic, is their true self because there’s been so much external validation and external control.”

According to Nelson, this sense of taking control of her art is evident in Moore’s music. “I feel like it’s almost music that comments on the miracle of its own existence,” they said. “The relief and catharsis is something that’s audible in what she’s releasing.”

In an Instagram post announcing the album release, Moore commented on how uncertain her life was when she was creating her album. The pandemic was in full-blaze, and Moore was pregnant.

Moore and Taylor Goldsmith (singer-songwriter, record producer and husband to Moore since 2018) announced that she was pregnant with their first child in September 2020. Moore gave birth to her son Gus in February 2021.  

However, her musical comeback doesn’t show any signs of slowing down soon. About a month ago, Moore announced her next album, “In Real Life,” which was released on May 13.

“It’s kind of like a sister chapter to the record that she put out two years ago,” Kaplan said. “I feel like she’s just genuinely celebrating the joy as a new mom with her family, and I think that’s really shined through.”

Kaplan said that she really found the song “Little Dreams” reflective of parenthood and Moore’s experience with this new stage in her life. “It is a song that really touches on where she’s at in terms of the quieter moments in her life and being a mom, staying at home with her husband and her cats and her dog,” she said, “embracing those moments that aren’t in the spotlight.”

Moore emphasized this sentiment in a press release following the release of “Little Dreams.”

“It’s about the little things we look back on with such nostalgia when we’re reflecting on a particular point in time: the walk you took with someone right after it had rained or the drive when someone introduced you to a record that wound up becoming one of your favorites,” she said. “It doesn’t always have to be about the flashy things that scream out to us – it’s all those quieter, simpler moments that are worth recognizing and celebrating too.”

Moore will be touring this summer in North America for the first time in over a decade, kicking off at the Variety Playhouse on June 10 in Atlanta, Georgia. Moore, Goldsmith and NBC refused to comment on this story.