Hilary Duff’s kids were asleep on the tour bus as it pulled up to Austin’s Germania Insurance Amphitheater. It was 5 a.m., but Duff, high on adrenaline from her show the previous night, was wide-awake — just like she’d been for the seven nights prior. She hoped to finally get some sleep, but unfortunately for her, the amphitheater is next to the Circuit of the Americas racetrack, and a fleet of F1 cars were just starting their day.
“It was like, feeoooo, feeoooo, feeeoooo,” Duff says, approximating the sound of those cars throttling by at 150 miles an hour. Staring down another day of being a mother before getting onstage to be a pop star, Duff was on the verge of malfunction.
“I’d only gotten two hours of sleep, and it was like, ‘Help me, please,’” she recalls. “My husband grabbed my pillow, my blanket, blasted sound machines, gave me an eye mask, gave me earplugs, put headphones on top of the earplugs and was like, ‘I will keep the kids away from you. Don’t come out of here for six hours, because you have a show tonight.’ ”
Nearly 25 years into her musical career, Duff is no stranger to life on the road. But until her zeitgeist-capturing Lucky Me Tour this past summer, she’d never brought her husband and kids along for the ride. The ongoing run is supporting her February album, Luck … Or Something, a surprise hit after Duff’s 11-year break from music that reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200. With its tight 37 minutes of catchy, clever and often genuinely deep bops, it proved she still has serious pop cachet to spare. The album currently has 411.4 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate.
Read Billboard’s full Hilary Duff cover story here. Hilary Duff will sit down for an exclusive conversation at the 2026 Billboard Live Music Summit, where she will receive the Outstanding Pop Tour of the Year Award. Tickets for the Nov. 10 event are available here.
