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When Mandy Moore summited Mount Kilimanjaro last year, with then-fiancé Taylor Goldsmith by her side, it was more than a feat of physical endurance.
The singer and actress had also proverbially reached the mountaintop after quite the uphill climb, with no guarantee that happiness would be waiting for her at the end.
But though the journey ultimately proved worth it, whatever was waiting for her was going to be better than what she was putting behind her.
“It’s no coincidence to me that once I did that hard work, life opened up in a way that I never could have expected,” Moore told Bustle in November. “Once I did that, it was like, the sun came back out again. In every respect I felt like, ‘Oh, now I’m living the life that I’m supposed to be living.”
Over the past few months, Moore has been opening up about what sort of relationship she had with Ryan Adams, whom she married in 2009 and separated from in 2015. And though she made it fairly clear after they split up that she was glad to have turned the page on that chapter of her life, no one knew the extent of how unhappy the story was.
Even she was unaware of it at times.
In an interview on Marc Maron‘s WTF podcast, conducted a few weeks ago and released Monday, Maron jokingly referred to her being married now to a “second rock guy” and, a bit later, asked if her brothers now preferred Goldsmith’s band, Dawes, to Ryan Adams’ music.
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“Everyone does, yeah. Everyone in my life!” she replied, laughing.
Well, they have their reasons.
Because Moore is now a star of one of the most talked-about shows on TV in This Is Us, and just won her first SAG Award last month as part of the NBC drama’s winning ensemble, it’s easy to forget about the drier years, when even she wondered if her time had passed.
The fact that those years largely coincided with her marriage could have been a coincidence—lots of actors and artists slow down to focus on their relationships or families. But in Moore’s case, it wasn’t a coincidence.
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“I was living my life for him,” Moore said on WTF. “I had no sense of self. I felt like I was drowning. It was so untenable and unsustainable and it was so lonely. I was so sad. I was lonely with him.”
Moore similarly reflected to Bustle in November, “When I think back to that particular time period that we’re talking about…It was heavy. It was dark. It was confusing. It was lonely. There was no room for me. There was no room for me to have anything else in my life.”
Moore’s last album, Amanda Leigh (her real name), came out in May 2009, a couple months after she and Adams got married. She had been recording music since she was 15, having left high school after her freshman year to commit to it full-time. That was Moore’s sixth studio album and she was under the impression that there would be more to come in her near future.
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Getting back to it. It’s time. I miss it. I’m not scared anymore. No more excuses. No more allowing someone’s else insecurities to dictate my relationship to music and singing. Boom. Also- this is just a little demo of something @themikeviola and I worked on yesterday… but still, it’s a start! ?
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Moore said on WTF that, while she never relied on it as her sole source of income or only source of creativity, “music’s always what I’ve been more passionate about, so [as a young recording artist] I was happy to have some semblance of it in my life” while making her name as an actress.
And she’s getting back into the music, she said.
Last July she posted a video on Instagram of a mixing board and she can be heard singing in the background. She captioned the post: “Getting back to it. It’s time. I miss it. I’m not scared anymore. No more excuses. No more allowing someone’s else insecurities to dictate my relationship to music and singing. Boom. Also- this is just a little demo of something @themikeviola [who produced Amanda Leigh] and I worked on yesterday… but still, it’s a start!”
Also, Moore has been subtly referring to Adams’ issues and the crisis of confidence she suffered during her marriage for awhile now.
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