Even harder to believe: This mom to four young children is choosing this moment to hit the gas on her music career. During the last decade she’s chosen projects that filmed in LA, like the Hulu sitcom How I Met Your Father, which ran for two seasons between 2022 and 2023. In some ways it would probably have been easier to never make music again, because with albums comes touring. But she felt compelled to speak directly to the fans who, like her, were navigating new life stages.
“I just felt really ready to share,” she says. “One, I wanted to stretch creatively, and two, I wanted to make something that I could connect with people again on the level of who I am now. I felt like people have definitely gone through some of the similar large strokes that I have in the past 10 to 15 years.”
Tory Burch jacket, top & skirt; Graff earrings
The genius hat trick of luck… or something is that it does exactly that: The lyrics delve into a particular type of mid-30s ennui, when you’re happily partnered and settled, but restless and yearning for the messy spontaneity of your youth. “Give me some first times like we still got ’em,” she sings on one track. “I’m worried I’ve felt everything I’m ever going to feel.”
The album’s intimacy is a result of its close-knit production. Duff wrote and produced it nearly exclusively with her husband of six years, Matthew Koma, a songwriter and producer who himself has contributed significantly to millennial culture (he cowrote the inescapable 2012 club banger “Clarity” by Zedd.) And while she never wanted to create a project explicitly about motherhood, the richness of her experience of devoting herself to family was ultimately a wellspring of creativity.
“The things that came out because of being a mother were these feelings of my life being so different or yearning for times that I was wilder, free, or more fun,” she says. “Not that I really want to go back to that time, but sometimes I do.”
