I was wearing space buns again, a shimmery pink and gold dress, sneakers, and my wallet was stuffed with fruit snacks. My friend and I had arrived at The Wiltern in Los Angeles in the early morning hours, joining a queue that technically started at 3 a.m. the night before. We were there for Hilary Duff’s “Small Rooms, Big Nerves” tour, a carefully curated string of shows hitting only London, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Hundreds of thousands of fans fought for tickets. We won.
Walking into that venue, I realized something kind of surreal. I was 30-something years old, surrounded by people my age, all dressed up for a pop star we loved when we were kids. And somehow it didn’t feel silly at all.
When Your Childhood Character Becomes Your Adult Companion
Lizzie McGuire was more than just a TV show. For those of us watching in the 2000s, she was a friend who understood the absolute chaos of being a tween girl. She had bad hair days. She thought about boys obsessively. She had an animated inner monologue that said all the things we couldn’t. And the person who played her, Hilary Duff, somehow made all of that feel less lonely.
But here’s the thing nobody talks about enough: Hilary Duff the person has always been separate from Lizzie McGuire the character. When Duff stepped into music as a teenager, she wasn’t riding on Lizzie’s coattails (well, except for that one time in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie,” and honestly, that song slapped). She was Hilary, making her own move, writing her own story. Her 2003 and 2004 albums “Metamorphosis” and “Hilary Duff” kept me company during years when I desperately needed an anchor to something that felt real.
Singing “So Yesterday” into my bedroom mirror with a hairbrush microphone felt sacred then. Looking back, it still does.
The Album That Brings Everyone Home
Duff’s first album in over a decade, “Luck… or Something,” dropped on Friday, and it’s not what I expected. When I say that, I mean it’s somehow better than I hoped. The title itself addresses questions she’s been asked forever. “How are you the normal one? How did you escape all of these childhood stardom things?” she told Variety. There’s real vulnerability in how she approaches these questions, giving credit to luck and to herself equally.
Walking through the Wiltern that night, fans everywhere were already obsessed. Some were pressed against the doors before they opened. Others were frantically trying to snag merch. The current era aesthetic shows Duff in browns and blacks, sheer thigh-highs, and a kind of sophisticated maturity that tracks with the album’s themes. In the “Mature” music video, a butterfly lands on her cheek, a callback that hits different if you’ve been paying attention for twenty years.
When she sang “Fly” and “Metamorphosis” and “What Dreams Are Made Of” to a crowd of superfans, something shifted inside me. But what really got me? The new songs. “We Don’t Talk” is about her sister Haylie, and it’s the kind of specific emotional honesty that makes you feel less alone in your own family rifts. “Future Tripping” tackles anxiety by naming it out loud. “Mature” isn’t preachy about age-gap relationships or growing up, it just exists in that space with you.
A Collaboration Built on Understanding
Her biggest creative partner on this album is her husband, Matthew Koma, a producer, songwriter, and frontman for Winnetka Bowling League. They have three daughters together, and he’s stepdad to her son Luca. They met while working on her 2015 album, and something about that timeline matters here. These aren’t two people making art in a vacuum. They’re a couple building something while raising a family, which is why songs like “Roommates” land so hard.
“I want the highlights, ten out of ten / The butterflies from holding your hand,” Duff sings on that track. It’s not about the beginning of love or the peak of passion. It’s about wanting to remember what easy felt like. On Winnetka Bowling League’s “Sha La La,” Koma sings, “I miss the us where we were both excited / You could tell by the Verizon bill we’d talk all night and never sleep.” Two artists understanding the exact same longing from different angles.
That’s the energy people are traveling to experience.
When the Crowd Becomes Part of the Show
Most artists have a problem at reunion tours or comebacks. The audience only wants the hits. They want nostalgia, not new material. Duff encountered the opposite. The Wiltern was packed with people excited to hear “Roommates” and “Mature” and unreleased tracks from “Luck… or Something.” It felt like feedback flowing both ways. When we made heart signals at her, she made eye contact and hearted us back.
She brought audience members up for her internet-famous “With Love” dance and handed them T-shirts that, when combined, spelled out “World Tour Loading.” In that moment, I understood why this matters. This isn’t a nostalgia cash grab. This is a person who genuinely wanted to come back and do it right.
Before singing “Why Not,” the party anthem from the Lizzie McGuire movie, Duff addressed the room directly. “I can’t believe I’m here again, 18 years later,” she said while fans screamed. “The world is super hard to process right now and so bleak. I want you all to know that each and every one of you here, I love you. You’re all welcome here.”
That’s not something a cynical pop star says. That’s something someone says when they actually mean it.
The Reunion We Didn’t Know We Needed
There’s something strange about looking in the mirror and finding that someone who doesn’t even know you has shaped who you became. Millions of fans exist in Duff’s world, and she can’t know them individually. But she has a gift for turning her most human moments into art that feels personal anyway. In promotional content, fans could FaceTime with Duff to hear snippets of new tracks about growing up and facing things on our own.
Isn’t it nice that we can come full circle and sing about it with the person who filmed an entire episode of television about getting a bra? The person who told us through her character to “laugh it off, let it go, and when you wake up, it will seem so yesterday?” She’s the person willing to rerecord that song for people like me who still love it so much.
We’re pausing our heavily mediated lives to smile and feel light in a time of heaviness. We’re also living out a reunion with someone who helped us grow up. Maybe that’s corny. Maybe it’s exactly what we all need right now.
