Hilary Duff Helped Millennials Grow Up Now She

I looked in the mirror and re-did my space buns again. I was wearing a sparkly pink and gold dress with sneakers and my wallet was full of packets of fruit snacks. My friend wanted to wait in line five hours early to Hilary Duff Show at The Wiltern in Los Angeles. Technically, the line had started at 3am the night before, but it was still manageable once we arrived.

This was Duff’s Small Rooms, Big Nerves tour, which traveled only to London, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Hundreds of thousands of fans fought for tickets.

Duff’s first album in more than a decade, “Luck… or Something,” debuted Friday. The title “answers a lot of questions I get asked frequently. ‘How are you normal? And how did you escape all that child stardom stuff?’ And I can give credit to certain things, or I can give credit to myself,” Duff said. Variety.

Fans like me found a friend in Duff’s beloved Disney Channel character, Lizzie McGuire, in the 2000s. But it wasn’t Lizzie who decided to pursue pop music as a teenager (well, except that time in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie”). It was Duff. And it is Duff, now, who returns to music at the perfect time.

“It feels like my old self and my new self have mixed together,” Duff says of the making of her new album, in an adorable Billboard video where her son interviews her.

This is a gift for fans who fondly remember the singer’s teenage discography but are also excited to walk through adulthood with her.

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Her 2003 and 2004 albums, “Metamorphosis” and “Hilary Duff,” accompanied me throughout my adolescence. I was a kid in a world choir pressing play on a Boombox and singing “So Yesterday” in front of the mirror. Those times seem sacred, in retrospect.

More than two decades later, I’m surrounded by people like me who took Duff’s music seriously and kept it close. The Wiltern is full of superfans. Some are scolded for pressing the doors before they open. Others are trying to get products quickly. Duff’s current era shows the singer wearing a brown sweater, black lace-embellished shorts, and sheer black thigh-high stockings. She continues with this color combination in her “Mature” music video. At the end, a butterfly lands on his cheek, a familiar symbol to longtime fans.

“Watching the butterfly go skyward / I wonder what I’ll become,” Duff sings to us, imitating poetry as her hand gracefully flutters upward. My friend films me during another special memory: “Forget about the reasons why you can’t in life/ And start trying/ Because it’s your time/ Time to fly.”

As cool as it is to see Hilary Duff across the room singing “Fly,” “Metamorphosis,” and “What Dreams Are Made Of,” her new music draws me in and also strikes a chord with me.

“We Don’t Talk” addresses his relationship with his sister, Haylie. “We come from the same house, the same blood/ A different explanation but the same thought/ People ask me if I’ve seen you/ And I honestly hate it because the truth is that I need you/ But there’s no way to convey it.”

“Future Tripping” finds Duff premeditating on anxiety: “I’m worried/ Shit that hasn’t happened/ Entertaining every doubt/ Oh, here I go again.” Story of my life.

Hilary’s music is very honest. She traces the contours of the conflict in “Weather for Tennis.” Its lead single, “Mature,” is one that I find singable and indirectly relatable. Although I’ve never been in an age-gap relationship, I’ve spent time remembering who I was “before I got smarter.”

Her biggest collaborator on “Luck… or Something” is her husband, Matthew Koma, the producer, songwriter and leader of the Winnetka Bowling League. He and Duff have three daughters and he is the stepfather of their son, Luca. The pair met working on Duff’s 2015 album, “Breathe In. Breathe Out.”

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Listening to Winnetka Bowling League’s “Sha La La” next to Duff’s “Roommates,” I know artists understand the desire to return to easier, freer times in relationships and life.

“I want the highlights, ten out of ten/The butterflies holding your hand,” Duff sings. “Roommates.” “I miss that moment when we were both excited/ You could tell by the Verizon bill that we talked all night and never slept,” Koma sings in “Sha La La.”

Perhaps the people who make the pilgrimage to see Duff in concert have felt that way too. We are not always interested in revisiting our past, but sometimes we want to recover small fragments.

I’ve seen beloved acts perform at venues where fans are much more interested in nostalgic songs than newer tunes. Although Duff knew we wanted to hear the hits, he found a crowd that was excited to hear “Roommates,” “Mature,” and also the three unreleased songs from “Luck… or Something.”

It seemed like there was a feedback loop between Duff and us. Seeing us make heart signs, she made eye contact and responded to us.

Seeing Duff so moved by the public’s love, in turn, touched us.

Duff gathered volunteers from the audience to dance her Internet-famous “With Love” dance and announced her next move by handing them T-shirts that, combined, spelled “World Tour Loading.”

It’s a strange experience to look inside yourself and discover that someone who doesn’t even know you has shaped you. While this person may not know his millions of fans individually, he surely has a way of turning their most human moments into art that we feel on a molecular level.

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In a sneak peek of Hilary Duff’s promotional album HQ, fans got to see new tracks while pretending to FaceTime with Duff. In one fragment, its lyrics are about growing up and facing things on our own. If we have to do that, isn’t it nice to be able to come full circle and sing about it with the person who filmed an entire television episode in which her character gets her first bra, and the person who told us, “Laugh, let it go, and when you wake up, it’ll feel like yesterday?” She’s the person who is willing to re-record that song for people like me who still love it so much.

Duff is also clearly grateful.

“I can’t believe I’m here again, 18 years later,” she tells us on The Wiltern, as fans scream their love for her. “I wanted to say that there has been a general happiness and glow that you all have brought to these shows.”

“The world is very difficult to process right now and very bleak. I want everyone to know that each and every one of you who is here, I love you. You are all welcome here,” he adds.

Before singing her “party anthem,” “The Lizzie McGuire Movie” and her hit “Why Not,” Duff explains why we’re all here. We stop “to smile and feel light” in a moment of heaviness.

We are also experiencing a reunion with someone who helped us grow.