Hilary Duff Performs “Breathe In. Breathe Out.” Live for the First Time, More Than a Decade Later

Hilary Duff has finally played “Breathe In. Breathe Out.” live for the first time, giving one of the more devoted corners of her audience a long-awaited payoff more than a decade after the song arrived.

The title track from her 2015 album surfaced in the setlist during Duff’s Thursday night, May 14, performance at Los Angeles’ El Rey Theatre for SiriusXM’s Small Stage Series. In a video shared by Billboard, Duff sings the fan favorite with the kind of ease that makes the delay feel almost absurd in hindsight, dressed in jeans and an ethereal pink top with a long train. Her voice comes through buoyant and clear, while the crowd meets her line for line.

“I made a top 10 list of all the things I missed/ Your lyin’ eyes and lips, they didn’t make it,” she sings as the audience follows along. “And when I’m cold at night, I know that I’ll survive/ Until I feel all right, I’m gonna fake it.” It is the sort of deep cut that tends to live more vividly in fan memory than in most setlists, which is part of why this moment lands with such force.

Breathe In. Breathe Out. peaked at No. 5 on the Billboard 200 and stood as Duff’s last album until Luck … or Something arrived in February, ending a musical gap that lasted more than a decade. She is set to continue that comeback in June with the Lucky Me Tour.

Speaking to SiriusXM before the show, Duff was candid about how uneasy it felt to return to the stage after so much time away. “I don’t even think I had processed how scary it was, you know?” she said. “To just be on stage again and singing my old songs actually felt more comfortable than singing some of the new ones.

“There’s, like, muscle memory with those,” she continued. “But these [new songs] feel so a part of who I am now that it’s just this really cool like combination.”

For an artist who spent years away from album cycles and touring, the choice to revisit older material says something about the mechanics of a comeback. The old songs are not just familiar, they’re embodied. And in Duff’s case, that familiarity now sits alongside the newer work rather than competing with it.