This Oral History of Hilary Duff's First Album Will Leave You Moved

For some inexplicable but magical reason, Myspace has published a stunning exploration of how Hilary Duff’s first real album Metamorphosis came to be, in celebration of the 10th anniversary of the release of the record that spun hits such as “Come Clean” and “So Yesterday”.

An album that has been forgotten by many, Metamorphosis had a huge team working on it, most notably The Matrix, responsible for a huge portion of teen pop you know and love from the ’90s and early oughts. Author Jill Menze’s article is not exactly full of mind-blowing revelations, but it does make a convincing argument that without Hilary Duff, there would have been no Miley Cyrus or Selena Gomez. So explains songwriter Charlton Pettus:

She is sort of now that archetype for that whole genre. She was really sweet, no attitude or anything. She was really professional without being an artificial Disney pop kid. She was just a real normal, respectful good kid. She invented this model I guess that hadn’t really existed before—the symbiotic relationship between the channel and the music. If you put them on TV and that goes well, then they should make a record. It’s kind of a cliché and a joke now, but it was sort of a new idea then.

The piece also includes key quotes about how your favorite songs came to be, from Hilary’s mouth to your ears:

“Inner Strength” was an awesome experience. It was the first time Haylie [Hilary’s sister] and I really wrote together. It was a specific comfort place for me at the time because my life was changing so fast and so quickly, and it was kind of scary and a lot of times I felt alone or criticized.

Haylie also explains that a lot of the songs came from her own poems:

I used to write a lot of poetry, and I was turning 16 or had just turned 16 and I had written this poem about sweet 16. I read it for my family and Hilary looked at me and was like, “Let’s make that into a song,” [which became “Sweet Sixteen,” which was also used as the theme song to MTV’s My Super Sweet 16].

The one level that this piece fails on is that there are not nearly enough details surrounding Hilary’s time filming The Lizzie McGuire Movie but I’m sure Myspace is just saving that for later this year. They probably know better than any one that there’s always time to go back to the beginning, back to when the earth, the sun, the stars all aligned.