For
Miley Cyrus, complete personal and artistic freedom — the kind that allowed her to announce at the MTV Video Music Awards on Sunday that she was following 2013’s “Bangerz,” her platinum-selling, major label pop album, with 23
sprawling new songs, now streaming free online —
is something she’s earned after nearly a decade of fame. “That’s what I’ve got
the luxury to do,” Ms. Cyrus, 22, said at her home studio a week before the
show, at which she served as host, enthusiastically goofing on her reputation
for provocative costumes, speaking freely and drug use. She used the night to take
full advantage of the commercial platform to debut a different, decidedly
noncommercial version of herself. “I can just do what I want to do, and make
the music I want to make.”
The result is “Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz,” which finds the
singer again reimagining her role in culture, blowing out the pop-star
liberation narrative of “Bangerz,” and eager to show that what appeared to be a
performative, post-Disney, anything-goes ethos is more than a retail strategy —
it’s her all-encompassing aesthetic and lifestyle. And while she is operating
outside of her label contract, Ms. Cyrus is confident that, given the scope of
her influence, enough fans will come along to make this investment in her
individual happiness a worthy one.
“Yeah, I smoke pot/ Yeah, I love peace,” Ms. Cyrus screamed
during the unannounced V.M.A.s finale, a much-bleeped performance of “Dooo
It!,” the album’s raucous opening song, co-written with Wayne Coyne, who
produced much of the “Dead Petz” project, and other members of his band, the Flaming
Lips. Just don’t get the wrong idea, she warned, shooting glitter from between
her legs, surrounded by queens from “RuPaul’s Drag Race”: “I ain’t no hippie.”
In a more than five-hour interview at the Technicolor playland
in Studio City where she lives alone, Ms. Cyrus was vibrating with excitement
to share her pure, updated view of the world, at one point dancing in her
driveway as the new songs — some psychedelic and circular, others straight pop
with raw edges — rattled from her modest one-room studio (called “Love Yer
Brain” after a Flaming Lips song).
Early in her still-young adult career, “People were like, ‘Well,
she’s got some good people twisting the knobs to help her break out,’” Ms.
Cyrus said, surrounded by neon wall signs, a unicorn stuffed with rolling
papers and an inflatable purple alien. “Now it’s been long enough where they’re
like, ‘No one’s telling her what to do.’”
She added, “I’m not a chicken with my head cut off.”
Comfortable but amped up, wearing gray leggings, a black sports
bra and a Flaming Lips hoodie, and cursing as though she were in a Tarantino
movie, Ms. Cyrus alternated between green juice and green joints as she explained
the personal evolution, including death and love like she’d never known, that
led to this project.
First
came the passing in April 2014 of her beloved dog, Floyd, who was killed by
coyotes while the singer was on an eight-month world tour for “Bangerz.” Two
weeks later, after bawling through some performances, Ms. Cyrus was
hospitalized for more than a week in Kansas with a severe allergic reaction to
antibiotics. There she was visited by Mr. Coyne, 54, long one of her musical
heroes, with whom she’d recently begun collaborating.
But it wasn’t until she returned home to pursue natural healing
that things got “really trippy,” she said. “This is going to sound crazy,” but
a Chinese healer “sent me into a state where my dog was lifted out of my lungs
and placed on my shoulder,” she explained. “I pet my dog for like three hours,”
and after finally telling Floyd she had to “let go and put his energy out,” Ms.
Cyrus continued, “I really think, in a way, his energy went into Wayne’s
energy. What he was to me, Wayne has become.”
Mr. Coyne, who had first tapped Ms. Cyrus to sing on a cover of
The Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds” a few months earlier, has since
served as both a mentor and an artistic enabler.
“Her life, to her, is art,” he said. “If she wants to look this
way and say these things, she does it.”
Whereas “Bangerz”
saw a freshly unfettered pop renegade experimenting with her newfound power —
roiling some with its hip-hop tourism and provocative visuals — the id-heavy
experiments of “Dead Petz” reveal Miley as she exists now: aware of her
position as a youth-culture spokeswoman, and openly keen on drugs, sex, animals
and the environment. “I created my surroundings, my own world,” she said. “What
seems like fantasy or trippy, it’s not to me. It’s my actual reality.” (As she
sings on “Slab of Butter (Scorpion),” “Self control is not something I’m
working on.”)
As for the pace of her reinventions: “It’s really scary,” she
said. “If one of my friends doesn’t see me for two or three weeks, you have to
re-get to know me in a way. My soul will still be the same, but everything
around me can be different, and I won’t dress the same and maybe different
kinds of people will be around.”
Unlike other 22-year-olds, when Ms. Cyrus presents her passions,
she does it on a mass scale. On the new collection of songs, the clumsy rap
signifiers of “Bangerz” are gone, though some of the goofy kitsch remains, as
does production from Oren Yoel and Mike WiLL Made-It, the Atlanta producer and
lead architect of her last sound, who contributed some of the strongest songs
here (“Lighter,” “I Forgive Yiew”). Still, Ms. Cyrus said, “What Mike was to
‘Bangerz,’ Wayne is to this project.”
“When I made ‘Bangerz,’ it was as true to me then as this record
is now,” Ms. Cyrus said. “It just happened naturally in my head. It’s like
anything — styles just change.”
Mike
WiLL said he saw in Ms. Cyrus an organic need to regenerate. “Why would she
drop another ‘Bangerz’? Miley is the new Madonna,” he said.
In between albums, her personal life changed, too. After years
of tabloid-chronicled growing pains, Ms. Cyrus has retreated inward, becoming
“more of a homebody,” she said. She spends most days at her house, doing yoga,
smoking weed, playing with her many pets (including a massive pig) and making
art or music.
While a pop star like Taylor Swift may be gathering “musicians,
actresses, models, entrepreneurs,” she said, “I’m not trying to be in the
squad.” She continued, “None of my friends are famous and not because of any
other reason than I just like real people who are living real lives, because
I’m inspired by them.”
Ms. Cyrus has also tried to seize control of her own celebrity
narrative, delivering an unvarnished but well-curated version of herself
straight to her fans. “I put naked pictures on my Instagram — I don’t care,” she said.
“It’s not interesting anymore to see me like that.”
In 2014, Ms. Cyrus founded the Happy Hippie Foundation, a nonprofit for
homeless and L.G.B.T. youth, which she said has helped with her self-discovery.
“I feel very gender-fluid,” she said. “For a long time I didn’t understand my
own sexuality. I would get really frustrated and think I’d never understand
what I am, because I can’t even figure out if I’m feeling more like a girl or
boy. It took me talking to enough trans people to realize that I didn’t ever
have to decide on one.”
Then there is the influence of Mr. Coyne. “He’s everything in
the world — you can’t even define us,” Ms. Cyrus said. “I am 100 percent in
love with Wayne, and Wayne is in love with me, but it’s nothing sexual in any
way. That would be the grossest.”
His presence on the record is most obvious on songs like “Karen
Don’t Be Sad” and “The Floyd Song (AKA Sunrise),” which feature electronic zaps
and squiggles over acoustic guitar — Flaming Lips songs as sung by Miley Cyrus.
But Ms. Cyrus’s natural pop instincts, strong voice and country
storytelling often rise above her collaborators’ default modes, ensuring the
project won’t slip too far into obscurity. “The thing that keeps it together is
me,” Ms. Cyrus said. “It’s not like I get with Wayne and I act one way —
cosmic, cosmic — and then I get with Mike and I start rapping on the beat.”
Because she wasn’t aiming for radio, Ms. Cyrus was also free to
be more extreme, with her libertine persona. She gets gleefully foul-mouthed
and graphic on songs like “BB Talk,” a rambling monologue about an overly
affectionate lover, and “Bang Me Box,” a Mike WiLL-produced song about lesbian
sex that Ms. Cyrus said was “pretty self-explanatory.”
It was the personal, homemade nature of the project — and Mr.
Coyne’s nontraditional career with the Flaming Lips — that persuaded Ms. Cyrus
to release it via the streaming site SoundCloud.
She said the album cost about $50,000 to make — “Bangerz” was “a
couple million” — although RCA Records, her label, did not contribute to the
budget this time around. “They had never heard the record until it was done,”
she said, and it won’t count toward fulfilling her multi-album contract.
The label said in a statement: “Miley Cyrus continues to be a
groundbreaking artist. She has a strong point of view regarding her art and
expressed her desire to share this body of work with her fans directly. RCA
Records is pleased to support Miley’s unique musical vision.”
Ms. Cyrus said it’s hard to imagine fitting again into a
mainstream mold. “I don’t think I’ll grow that way,” she said. “It seems like
it would be backwards.” Her team of advisers, she added, “said they’d never
seen someone at my level, especially a woman, have this much freedom. I
literally can do whatever I want. It’s insane.”
Still, “This music was not meant to be a rebellion,” she said.
“It was meant to be a gift.”
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