Mandy Moore’s 5-year-old son, Gus, is among the top listeners of her 1999 breakthrough hit, “Candy.”
“I don’t know how or why, because I would not play that for him, but now he wants to hear it in the car,” Moore, 42, told People in an interview published Tuesday, September 1. “I’ve had to put a moratorium on it. I’m like, ‘Bud, I don’t want to hear it every day.’”
Whenever Gus asks Moore why they can’t listen to “Candy,” the This Is Us alum merely explains that the track is “just not [her] favorite.”
“Hearing it every once in a while is a total fun little bop and stroll down memory lane,” she acknowledged. “He’s like, ‘I’m the same age that you were when you made that song.’ I was like, ‘No, you’re 5, but you are closer, probably, to that age than I am to that age.’ It’s pretty funny that he can make that distinction.”
In addition to Gus, Moore shares son Ozzie, 3, and daughter Louise, 2, with musician husband Taylor Goldsmith. Gus, in particular, has already begun to follow both of his parents’ musical footsteps.
“We have a little songwriter in our midst. Our oldest has already written his first album,” she teased to People. “There’s nine songs. It’s only 21 minutes long, but he wants to listen to it in the car.”
Per Moore, Gus’ debut unreleased album was recorded via her and Goldsmith’s smartphones. The Dawes performer, 41, even played piano in the background.
“[Gus] makes up these songs, and then he wants to listen back to them. It’s so much fun,” Moore gushed. “He’s definitely inspired by Dad, for sure.”
Moore and Goldsmith are content with their family of five, recently coming to the realization that they were done expanding their brood further.
“I’m at the OBGYN getting a checkup … I am endlessly grateful for my beautiful family,” Moore wrote via her Instagram Stories in January. “AND there’s a certain sadness knowing I’m done having babies and won’t be pregnant again.”
Moore gave birth to Louise in 2024 when she was in her early 40s.
“I think, at least in my experience, so many of my friends are having kids later in life, whether it’s by choice or it’s by circumstance or biology,” she said on the “Not Gonna Lie” podcast in July 2025. “I think the thing that I had the most trouble with is just like this system in general kind of treating us as this anomaly that we’re too old and we’re too complicated or high risk, and really, it’s like, ‘Nope, we’re just human beings.’”
