Background music is "Haters" from Hilary's new self-titled album in stores now.  If you don't have it yet, you need to go out and get it, it's worth the $!

After her Metamorphosis from kiddie cult-figure Lizzie McGuire to pop star, Hilary Duff is stepping up to the mic again to release her sophomore album.

The self-titled LP from pop's reigning good girl features such tracks as "Haters," "Mr. James Dean," "Do You Want Me" and "Fly."

MIAMI — What do you get when you stuff two stylists, a publicist, a magazine shoot, two TV shoots, two security guards, a makeup artist, two hairstylists, two dogs and a mom in one place? Hilary and Haylie Duff's very crowded room at the Palms Hotel in the hours leading up to the Video Music Awards.

While the Duff duo were getting ready for their red carpet arrival the afternoon of the awards, their two-bedroom penthouse suite was swarmed with people assisting with that process. It's just that the process wasn't so simple.

The sitting area was filled with people who were there to write stories on the Duff girls, and their publicist was trying to adhere to a tight schedule, which had the sisters out the door by 4:45 p.m. Despite the fact that at 4:20 Hilary hadn't been able to eat and Haylie's hair wasn't finished yet, they posed for every shot, sat for every interview, and charmed everyone in the room at the same time.

While Hilary was posing for photos, she talked about bands with her makeup artist. While Haylie was getting her makeup done, she enthused about the idea of seeing Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen at the awards, as well as her old pal Ashlee Simpson.

Behind the scenes, the stylists took over one bedroom with wardrobe items. There were two racks of clothing (outfit options for the red carpet, the awards and the parties), at least 50 pairs of shoes from Gucci to Richard Tyler to Christian Louboutin, and so many accessories that they took up both beds and some shelf space as well. The stylist who pulled the clothes for the event was ironing, sewing, and mixing and matching jewelry to find the exact right look for each of the girls. The other bedroom was private and used for actual sleeping, though only the dogs were enjoying that luxury before the VMAs.

While Hilary was getting her makeup done, Haylie was checking out the catered food. After surveying the choices — fruit, seafood salad, chicken, salmon, mozzarella and tomato salad, and a whole table devoted only to desserts — Haylie popped some olives in her mouth and prepared a plate of food. "You guys have to eat the olives," she said while taking a bite of half a tuna sandwich, "or else I'm going to finish them." She then declared her love not only for the tempting olives, but also for peperoncini.


When it came time for Haylie's makeup, she turned up the Red Hot Chili Peppers on the iPod and passed along some grooming tips she'd picked up from all the makeup artists she's worked with, such as a warning against waxing your eyebrows: The skin above the eyes is so thin that when you keep tearing it off, it ages faster.

Later on the iPod, Hilary played the Smiths and the Postal Service and sang along to the latter's "Such Great Heights" while she layered on tons of antique gold necklaces in preparation for the show. As Haylie put on her vintage green and gold belt, she said, "I hope this is one of the things I get to keep."

By 4:30 p.m., one of the security guards gave five seconds to the remaining members of the press by literally counting to five and moving the girls to the next station. He and the publicist wanted people to pack it in so Hilary, Haylie, their mother, and their friends could enjoy 15 short minutes of alone time before the whole zoo began again.

From the San Fransisco Chronicle on August 28, 2004

TV, movies, music -- Hilary Duff's so there

The list of things you can't talk about with Hilary Duff is exhausting. There will be no questions, please, about her tangles with Lindsay Lohan, Avril Lavigne, Aaron Carter, Paris Hilton, Frankie Muniz or any number of other touchy people that have come into her orbit over the past few years. But calling from a tour stop in Boise, Idaho, the teen star is so accommodating in every other way that it's easy to forget that her face has become such a fixture in the pages of Us Weekly.

She seems, well, real.

She makes fun of Britney Spears' recent barefoot exploits in public bathrooms. "You know what I think of when I go into a public bathroom at a gas station?" Duff says. "How your shoes kind of, like, stick to the ground." She gags at the mention of her backstage surroundings: "Some venues are nicer than others, but most of these places are beat up." She talks about her first crush -- Jonathan Taylor Thomas. "My sister and I were going through a box of pictures when we were in Houston and she had taken a picture of me next to a poster of -- we called him JTT -- and I was posing exactly how he was posing," she howls. "I destroyed it!"

Right away, she apologizes for being late. Duff has nearly completed work on her self-titled second album, the follow-up to last year's "Metamorphosis," which sold 3.2 million copies, and she explains that the first part of the day was spent scrambling to record an outro for the disc. "You should have seen it! " she gasps. "Oh, my God! It was the most ghetto recording setup you've ever seen in your life -- just a little microphone attached to all these computers."

The new CD comes out on Sept. 28, which also conveniently also happens to be the same day she celebrates her 17th birthday. But it seems unlikely that Duff will find much time to celebrate either milestone. While both Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera spiked their summer tours, she is playing to packed stadiums just about every night on her 36-date Most Wanted Tour, which reaches the Arena in Oakland on Tuesday. Her latest single, "Fly," meanwhile, is taking over pop radio with the same deadly precision as her previous hits, "So Yesterday" and "Come Clean."

Even she can't quite figure out the secret of her success. "It blows my mind every day," she says. "I'm so excited and so shocked when a huge venue is filled every single day with people who want to see me. I just go, 'This can't be.' "

The pop career is just one piece of the Hilary Duff juggernaut. The Houston native got her start on the Disney Channel's television series "Lizzie McGuire" in 2001, which she quit after a fall-out with the network, and she enthusiastically moved on to conquer the film world with a breakout role in an update of "Cheaper by the Dozen." Her most recent motion picture, "A Cinderella Story," grossed $30 million in its first two weeks, and she's got two others on the way, "Raise Your Voice" and "A Perfect Man."

But no teen empire is complete without its own retail brand. Stuff by Hilary Duff is available at Target stores.

Does she ever sleep?

"No, I am a vampire," she says, laughing. "The thing is there's so much going on right now, and I want to do it all. So I have to sacrifice things like sleep. Besides, after having 12,000 people screaming at you the way you feel inside makes it really hard to calm down."

There have been some side effects, she admits. For example, Duff says she has lost the ability to dream. "I hate that because I love those crazy dreams where the most random people show up and the most random things happen," she says.

But she doesn't seem too broken up about it. During this tour, she is performing five songs from her new album. She's also doing her remake of the Go-Go's hit "Our Lips Are Sealed," a duet with 19-year-old sister and opening act Haylie, during the encore. But at most of the shows, the highlight has been her bratty cover of the Who's "My Generation," with the gratuitously inverted lyric, "I hope I don't die before I get old." "So many people gave me flak for that, but I don't care what they say," she insists. "I like it."

Perhaps it's because she simply doesn't have the time to die. After the current tour wraps up in Vancouver next month, she's off to do it all over again in Hawaii, Australia and Japan. "I think that I am burnt out right now," she says. "But I'm taking a month off in November, and I know I have enough energy stored up until then."

Most people her age call it a year after they shoplift a Good Charlotte album. "You know what's funny?" Duff says. "I don't feel 16. Sometimes I do and sometimes I don't. I get to travel the world and sometimes I think if people got to see what I see then they would be motivated to do it too, you know?"

UNIONDALE, New York — They came in minivans, SUVs and station wagons. They performed synchronized dance routines in the parking lot, set up tailgating spreads with apple slices and tortilla chips, and squealed with delight ... loudly and often. An army of young Hilary Duff-ettes, many of them dragging bewildered parents and bored older brothers by the hand, ready to dance, sing and scream for their idol.

That Hilary Duff has become a cottage industry is not exactly breaking news — her debut album, Metamorphosis, has sold more than 3 million copies, and her latest film, "A Cinderella Story," grossed $30 million in less than two weeks. What is noteworthy is that in a rocky tour landscape (fellow teen queens Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera have both called off their tours), Duff is packing them in. It's also noteworthy that somewhere along the way, she's been anointed spokesperson for a pop generation.

Parents in the parking lot of the Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum saw Duff as the anti-Britney, a safe, non-sexualized (and non-chain-smoking) "wonderful role model" who's "got a good image" for their girls. Duff's young fans (mostly falling into the "tween" demo) love her not just because she's "nice to everyone" but also because she most definitely "rocks." So when Duff ran onstage — decked out in a black tank top and studded skirt, clutching a hot-pink microphone — she was walking a tightrope: trying to be both the role model and the rabble-rouser. And she pulled it off.

Kicking it off with a guitar-heavy version of "Girl Can Rock," Duff bounded from one side of the stage to the other, slapping hands, blowing kisses and even flashing a Dio-worthy version of the devil horns. Whether or not the girls in attendance caught the song's "grrrl-power!" message was debatable. For many, it was their first concert, and those seemed content to wave glowsticks, smack around beach balls and scream. A lot.

Duff segued into the punky "Weird," the first single from her next album, which, as she told the crowd, "comes out on my birthday, September 28." The announcement was greeted with more glowsticks and beach balls. And, of course, more screaming.

Her set featured all the hits: "Come Clean," "So Yesterday," "Party Up," all played with a surprisingly bratty aplomb. The fact that Duff's backing outfit featured a heavily tatted dude shredding guitar and a mushroom-headed bassist bouncing around in the background was certainly flaunted; she made sure the kids applauded "her awesome band" no less than three times in an hour.

There was no Britney-esque cavorting, and save a few stray tugs on her skirt, about the most risquι Duff got was when she performed a song called "Do You Want Me?" There were more messages of empowerment ("It's hard to be what you are ... and harder to be what you're not!" and "Take a crazy chance! Do a crazy dance!"), and an encore duet with sister Haylie (who opened the show) to pump the soundtrack to "A Cinderella Story". And then she was gone.

Duff's army of young supporters clapped wildly, waved handmade signs and started loud "HI-LA-RY!" chants. They wanted one more song. And Hilary obliged, sprinting back onstage and launching into a cover of the Who's "My Generation" (which finally got the parents out of their seats.) And by the song's end — which found Duff thrusting her fist into the air and inverting the song's famous lyric into "I hope I don't die before I get old!" — she had made her statement ... that she did in fact speak for all of these young girls wearing Hilary T-shirts and "HD" visors. And it kind of spoke for itself.

Article is located at http://www.mtv.com/news/articles/1489742/20040727/story.jhtml

At 16, Duff is two years younger than Olsen -- who last month checked into a clinic to be treated for the eating disorder -- but the star can already empathize with her, because she's fully aware of the demands forced on rising talents to look glamorous.

She says, "It's the pressures put on young celebrities.

"You open a magazine and it's all about someone being too skinny or too fat, no longer pretty, having the wrong hair color or not making it into the most recent popularity poll.

"(I don't) pretend to know what Mary Kate is going through, but I can understand a bit of it on a certain level.

"As a young celebrity, there are times when you feel your life is being controlled by so many other things that eating is the last thing you really do have some control over."

But she has assured fans she will never succumb to anorexia: "I love food too much. I eat sensibly, but I do love to eat."

The singer-turned-movie star, 16, has been spotted out and about with the Good Charlotte singer, 25, in Canada, where Duff is making a new film, "The Perfect Man," with Heather Locklear. ________________________________________________________________________________ P.S. Hilary stated on TRL, that she just met Joel that day, and they were both in town for the Much Music Awards. She said that they went to get coffee, and now the press thinks she's dating him. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- THIS IS NOT TRUE!!! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- (FYI: Hilary is 17 years old, and Joel is in his late twenty's!)

Lohan, 17, has been embroiled in a bitter war of words with Duff since they were both dating pop heartthrob Aaron Carter at the same time -- but the "Freaky Friday" beauty can't understand why Duff is still fueling the feud.

She says, "Maybe she has a problem with me, but I don't think she should. She doesn't need that. Her career is going great."

The singer -- who has yet to bump into 16-year-old Duff socially -- says her reasons for disliking the blonde are justified, as she's a "goody-goody."

Lavigne, 19, rages, "I don't really like her. She's too much of a kiss a--. You can tell that she's a goody-goody. She'll probably try to avoid me for the rest of her life."

But one pop rival has won new respect from sharp-tongued Lavigne -- superstar Britney Spears.

She adds, "If Britney wanted to be cool and hang out, then I would put all ego aside. But I don't regret anything I've said about Britney."

At the beginning of the month, Lohan guest-hosted the popular show, as part of promotional duties for her hit movie "Mean Girls."

But singer Duff, who fell out with Lohan after they dated pop heartthrob Aaron Carter at the same time, was less then impressed to see "SNL" regular Rachel Dratch dressed as her, singing that their feud was "so yesterday."

She tells TV show Access Hollywood, "When I heard that Lindsay was going to be on 'Saturday Night Live,' I knew she was going to make fun of me. I wasn't honored. I don't think it's an honor to be made fun of on 'Saturday Night Live.'

"I'm not here to talk bad about her like she talks bad about me all the time. I just knew that it was gonna happen."

Lohan hits back, "We didn't do anything derogatory towards her. I'm sorry if she felt offended her, but I thought things were cool. Hilary, I don't wanna start anything again!"

The 16-year-old singer, who once dated pop heartthrob Aaron Carter, has confirmed their relationship came to an end because they were both too busy to see each other.

She tells Star magazine, "While Jordy is a special person to me and we're still friends, the timing was just off.

"My career has to come first right now. I have my priorities straight."

The singer, 19, snapped back after actress/singer Duff, 16, told a reporter Lavigne needed to appreciate her fans more.

Angry Avril says, "Who the hell cares what she has to say about my fans? Whatever. Hilary Duff's such a goody-goody, such a mommy's girl."

The singer admitted she had never met Duff -- but mocked her good-girl image further, joking, "I'm sure she's really nice and really sweet. I'm sure she's all smiles."

Despite their rivalry, both teens have had their music careers helped by music maestros the Matrix.

The hunky prince has reportedly become infatuated with the singer-turned-actress and is romancing her over a series of romantic phone calls.

And Duff, who is supposedly dating actor Jordan Masterson, is delighted by her new admirer -- and is already planning to meet up with him in his native London soon.

A source tells the Daily Star, "Harry initiated the contact with Hilary. He pulled a few strings and was able to get his private telephone number to her. He was thrilled when she called.

"They've just started talking on a regular basis. It's a case of puppy love for both of them."

Excited Hilary told a pal, "This is just like a fairytale and he's my Prince Charming."

Little Dog Duff filled a hole in Hilary's heart when her first pooch Remington died when the actress-turned-singer was seven years-old.

The scruffy little dog wandered onto the Duff's estate in Texas and Hilary adopted her.

She says, "I don't know how she survived before she got to our house. There's thousands of acres of rattlesnakes, thorn bushes and coyotes in Texas."

Duff's new doggie clothing line will be called LDD.

The 16-year-old singer, who claims she inadvertently dated Carter while he was still romancing "Freaky Friday" actress Lindsay Lohan, is now the girlfriend of "Cheaper By the Dozen" co-star Jordan Masterson, 17.

The teens met more than a year ago, but romance blossomed after they hooked up again at a youngster's club in Encino, Calif.

Duff coos, "He's so nice. I love him."

Duff's sister Haylie adds, "I couldn't be happier. Jordan's a great kid and he's an actor, so he understands."

Jordan is the younger brother of "That '70s Show" star Danny Masterson.

The blonde beauties began battling when 17-year-old Lohan discovered that her then-boyfriend Carter, 16, had cheated on her with Duff, 16.

But Duff insists she did nothing wrong, explaining, "I didn't mean any harm if I dated him at the same time. I think he cheated on me, and I think he cheated on her ... I love him to death as a friend, (but) he made it look (to me) like they had broken up."

Duff also slams reports she had Lohan thrown out of the Hollywood premiere of her hit comedy "Cheaper by the Dozen" last month, insisting, "I couldn't even tell you what she looked like at the premiere. I think I've met her maybe twice.

"It's like every single time I see her, she starts talking bad about me. She's so mean to me. It's sad."