Current Billboard cover star Hilary Duff made an appearance at the Billboard Live Music Summit on Tuesday (Nov. 10) at the 1 Hotel West Hollywood to accept the award for Outstanding Pop Tour of the Year and talk about taking this run, The Lucky Me Tour, on the road.
Speaking with Billboard‘s executive editor Lyndsey Havens, Duff reflected on the moments when she decided that she wanted to tour behind her hit album luck… or something, a run that brought her back out on the road after an almost 20-year hiatus from touring.
“I remember sitting with my husband and talking about it, and he’s always the person to calm me down and make everything really digestible,” Duff said. “But then past that I was sitting with my manager Darren [Gilmore] and Colin Lewis at Live Nation and being like, ‘no, I’m gonna do this,’ and just being really scrappy and confident, and then sitting in my car and being like, ‘oh my god, am I gonna do this?’ It was just one foot in front of the other, and then this other part of me that was like, ‘I know how to do this, and I know that I can.’”
Duff has more than proved that she could, with The Lucky Me Tour having grossed $48.3 million from 610,000 tickets sold through its first 40 shows, according to Billboard Boxscore. At the Summit, Duff spoke about how the show has evolved throughout the run, which will continue next year with 32 more dates in arenas across Europe, Latin America and the United States from May through November.
“We’re constantly evolving and changing things,” Duff said. “Like, ‘oh, that really worked this night, let’s lean more into that’, or ‘that song doesn’t fit well there, let’s change that.’ Constantly gut-checking what feels good and lands well with me is what makes it land with other people.”
Duff also spoke about the realities of being away from her four children while on the road, saying that “It’s been a real practice in like, I matter too, and my dreams matter too. It goes against everything in your body to step away from the children that you created. But it’s okay to make sacrifices for your family and still live a life that you find purpose in just for yourself. This has just been a big year of dreaming, and some of those dreams becoming realities.”
She also talked about speaking to her younger selves, from the era when she was a child star on a hit TV show to an internationally famous teenage pop star to an early twenty-something who stepped away from it all to figure her life out.
“It would just be really nice to go back and tell her that she figured it all out in a really healthy way, and that it’s on her terms,” Duff said. “There was a point where when you’re on a train that’s going so fast, it’s hard to stop it, and I didn’t even know why I wanted to stop it — I was just overwhelmed and done. It’s really hard to stop that at that age, and to have enough guts to just need to pause.
“I did eventually pause for a really long time,” she continued, “and I think I would be really proud and be like, ‘Girl, you take a break and figure this out, and you go get an awesome family — [it will be a] roller coaster up and down sometimes, personally and professionally — but all that gets you to a really cool place.’ This has just been such an epic year, a year filled with love, and I’m so proud. I’m really proud of myself, and that’s hard to feel as an adult.”
