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"  Tucked into a corner booth at an elite, recession-proof West Village restaurant, Mandy Moore and I are talking music and movies while sharing pancakes. All around us, toxically tanned Euros and Europhiles are sipping frothy drinks, bitching about the service in St. Bart&amp;#039;s. Outside, snowflakes are filling the sky, and it&amp;#039;s starting to feel as if we&amp;#039;re sealed inside a very expensive snow globe. Moore, sitting to my right, is like an antidote. Implausibly polite, refreshingly sincere, and serially apologetic \u2014 Sorry it&amp;#039;s so noisy in here ... Sorry I&amp;#039;m such a Chatty Cathy ... Sorry for taking up so much of your time... (and later, via text, when she declines to answer questions about her engagement to Ryan Adams, Sorry Howie!! I hope you&amp;#039;re not mad...) \u2014 she epitomizes the kind of goodness people mistrust, believing it must be a ruse. She&amp;#039;s 5&amp;#039;10&amp;quot; and gives off a dermatological glow that calls to mind her origins as a teen pop sensation, known for straight-from-the-diary ballads and faux-sexualized middle-school dance tracks about candy. But Britney Spears or Jessica Simpson she is not. You simply don&amp;#039;t see Mandy Moore, almost 25, shaving her head, then attacking the paparazzi with an umbrella, dirty dancing with the tabloid media, or defibrillating her career with the soul-stealing contrivances of reality TV.  Instead, you see her mixing it up on the cred-conferring Entourage, holding her own opposite Diane Keaton in Because I Said So, and looking reasonably at home in edgy indies like Dedication, Southland Tales, and, most notably, as a wonderfully creepy queen bee in Saved! Not that any of it came easily. &amp;quot;I feel like I keep coming up against the same thing: They think I&amp;#039;m very cute and so sweet,&amp;quot; Moore says, tucking her down parka around her lap like a blanket. &amp;quot;But that won&amp;#039;t cut it anymore. I don&amp;#039;t want to be a wallflower. I don&amp;#039;t want to be shy. Give me the opportunity to get in the room and have a conversation as to why I know I can do this. It&amp;#039;s okay that you see me as this person, but I&amp;#039;m an actress, and I&amp;#039;ll work my ass off to play the part.&amp;quot;  And yet... &amp;quot;It has to be right,&amp;quot; Moore quickly adds. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve had the opportunity to play the drug dealer who gets gang-raped, and I&amp;#039;m like, For what reason? Doing it just to do it? To just show people that I can be sexy or dark? I don&amp;#039;t want to do something just to make that point. It needs to happen organically, and I&amp;#039;m really confident it will. I&amp;#039;m a pretty patient person, and I&amp;#039;ll wait until we find the right stuff.&amp;quot;   SLIDESHOW: SEE PHOTOS FROM MANDY&amp;#039;S COVER SHOOT HERE  The struggle to determine her own image has been just as intense with her music. After famously being discovered at 14 by a FedEx guy who connected Moore with someone he knew in the business, Epic Records signed her and set about packaging her as a bright-eyed, button-nosed pop princess. Six years later, her growing pains forced a split with the label. (She wanted to cover Todd Rundgren; they wanted Top 40.) Now she&amp;#039;s the flagship artist at Storefront Recordings, an independent label launched by her longtime manager, Jon Leshay, to coincide with her latest album, Amanda Leigh.  It&amp;#039;s her first since 2007&amp;#039;s Wild Hope. &amp;quot;I knew that record was my last chance,&amp;quot; says Moore \u2014 a reference to faltering record sales as she struggled to bust out of the bubblegum pack. &amp;quot;So I pushed and made it the way I wanted&amp;quot; \u2014 channeling Patti Griffin and Paula Cole and Joni Mitchell in gutsy torch songs like &amp;quot;Ladies&amp;#039; Choice&amp;quot; and &amp;quot;Gardenia.&amp;quot; She made the album far away from a sterile studio, in a big house on a mountaintop; for Amanda Leigh she secluded herself in a sound engineer&amp;#039;s basement studio in Medford, MA, recording by candlelight as the beer cans and coffee cups piled up. &amp;quot;We were down in the wormhole,&amp;quot; says Moore, who declined producer Mike Viola&amp;#039;s suggestion to stay in a comfortable hotel nearby. &amp;quot;This was the full-on artistic experience,&amp;quot; says Viola, &amp;quot;where you sleep in a drafty room and don&amp;#039;t shower for days. But you also come out of it having made the best record of your life. Mandy got to a place with her vocals that she&amp;#039;s never been. And I know some people think, Mandy Moore, whatever, but I swear, what she&amp;#039;s doing is unequivocal. I don&amp;#039;t think people will need to be convinced of anything once they hear it.&amp;quot;   For the rest of this interview and to find out what happened when fianc\u00E9 Ryan Adams showed up at Mandy&amp;#039;s Marie Claire cover shoot, check out the April issue of Marie Claire \u2014 on newsstands now. Award-winning New York-based writer Howie Kahn is a frequent Marie Claire contributor.   \u00BB Download now! Get free downloads of Mandy&amp;#039;s music here "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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