Mandy Moore politely tossed her hat back into the ring of popular music when she released “When I Wasn’t Watching” this September; the single—her first in a decade—was an initiating offering from her (still) untitled seventh studio album due at the top of 2020. A gorgeous and breezy piece, it was indicative of Moore’s musical brand she’d put in place with her third album Coverage (2003): pretty, mature, melodically driven pop.
With “I’d Rather Lose,” her second single, Moore gets more insistent in deepening the vintage California aural colors that her foremothers Linda Ronstadt and Stevie Nicks used in the 1970s and the early 1980s. Pulled dreamily along by its funky intermixture of bass rhythms and percussion, Moore’s romantic wanderlust is a bit darker and intense here, but it’s no less lush than “When I Wasn’t Watching.” That this new single has Moore drawing out a specific aesthetic strand from within her larger sonic broadloom and giving it such an emphatic tug evinces her commitment to reposition that backroad pop of yesteryear into a modern context.
“We live in a cultural moment of ‘win at all costs’ and that may afford small victories in the short term but this song tries to explore the idea of trying to live according to your moral compass, whatever that might be,” Moore explains in an official statement about the song’s inspiration. “It’s easy to run out of patience and give into temptations on any given day, but it seems like the only way of achieving the kind of long term peace of mind we’re all looking for, requires a recommitment to the concepts of honesty and integrity that ground us. On a macro level, that’s what this song aims to hit on—abandoning some game you never subscribed to in the first place.”
“I’d Rather Lose” is a bold bid and since her forthcoming album likely promises more of the same, that record may prove to be one of 2020’s best efforts.
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