Hilary Duff has spent the last decade focused on acting and motherhood, but she says she hasn’t ruled out a return to music.
“I always am thinking about it,” Duff, 36, told Access Hollywood on Monday, December 4, when asked whether she has any plans to record new songs. “I never wanna blame my kids for this, but I’m so immersed in motherhood right now, and it’s so much easier to book an acting job and be like, ‘OK, I have to be at work at 6 a.m. and then I’m gonna be done by 9 tonight and then I’m gonna be home.’ I am in the middle of my real life, and that is very much a part of not my real life, like, from my past. So, I have to just figure out a way for those two things to meet.”
Duff explained that the unstructured nature of making music feels difficult to juggle while raising kids. The Younger alum shares son Luca, 11, with ex-husband Mike Comrie and daughters Banks, 5, and Mae, 2, with husband Matthew Koma.
“Going to the studio feels so like, ‘Oh, my God, maybe we get something today, maybe we don’t,” Duff said. “It doesn’t feel like real work, [but] I know that it is.”
While she feels hesitant now, Duff said that she thinks that a day will come when she’ll no longer be able to resist the call. “I really do believe that I’ll just one day be like, ‘I have to do it,’” she said. “There’s going to be something that comes over me, and just like, I have to do it. So, it’s gonna happen — I just don’t know when.”
Duff cautioned fans that her return to music probably won’t happen in the near future, but she’s flattered that “someone out there still wants to listen to my music.”
While Duff has acted steadily since she became a mom in 2012, she hasn’t released an album in nearly a decade. Her fifth studio album, Breathe In. Breathe Out. dropped in June 2015 and featured the criminally underrated single “Sparks.”
Duff released Breathe In. Breathe Out. after another long break from music, as her previous album, Dignity, debuted in 2007.
“The album has taken on a lot of different lives, which I guess is to be expected when you’ve taken such a big break,” Duff told Time of Breathe In. Breathe Out. in 2015. “It is a little bit of electropop, a lot of it is just straightforward pop and some of it has gotten pretty dance-y, which is cool. Some songs still have a little bit of a folky side.”
In the same interview, she cited her acting career and parenthood as reasons that she had to take a big break between albums. “I feel like I got a little taste of it again and it got me excited,” she explained. “It’s just a balancing act of trying to have two careers that take up a lot of my time. And also being a mom — the most important one for me.”
