http://www.thecriticalcondition.com/2009/05/27/mandymoore/

Mandy Moore released her new album Amanda Leigh yesterday, and if I hadn't
happened to notice it being advertised on the iTunes homepage, I would have had
no idea it existed.

And that got me thinking… why isn't Mandy Moore more popular? She's proven
herself as both an actress and musician, yet despite kicking around for ten
years, she's never broken through to superstardom. She's an HBO talent with, at
best, a Style Channel profile.

Does anyone have theories on this? Is it because she's not a freak? I know we
Westerners often like our young female stars to be damaged, so we can experience
both horror and delight as they subvert of our unfair standards of feminine
propriety. Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse… they're all
trainwrecks, so we scold and gawk and go crazy for them.

Mandy Moore, meanwhile, has never spazzed out. In fact, I don't know anything
about her, except that she seems polite, hard-working, and talented. Maybe she's
a little conservative, sure,but not so conservative that she won't star in an
awesome movie like Saved!.

In other words, Moore's the kind of celebrity I prefer, because she's not up in
my face. But maybe that's what's keeping her from becoming a bigger star.

Yet even as I espouse that theory, I can contradict it. For every Winehouse
flameout, there's a Kate Winslet or Carrie Underwood success story that lets us
focus on a young female artist's talent more than her personal life.

So again… why the lack of Mandy Moore love, especially since she's demonstrated
awesomeness in two media? As an actress, she's reasonably good in bad movies (A
Walk to Remember, Because I Said So) and very good in good ones (Saved!), and
that's just her sideline career.

It's her music that merits the most enthusiasm.

Before I begin, try to forget Mandy Moore's roots as an anonymous teen-pop
singer. For several years now, she's been repositioning herself as a folk-rock
singer-songwriter, collaborating with brilliant artists like country
heartbreaker Lori McKenna and Candy Butchers` Mike Viola. Her music is
thoughtful and pretty and tinged with enough rock to give it a spine.

And look, I know this isn't going to be everyone's ultimate jam, but surely
there are people out there who would love this music if they only knew about it.
So I ask for the final time: Why don't they know about it?