Miley Cyrus says her new single 'Midnight Sky' is about her reclaiming the narrative about her life and split from husband Liam Hemsworth.
Miley Cyrus in Midnight Sky video
The 27-year-old pop star and 'Hunger Games' actor Liam, 30, separated in August 2019 after seven months of marriage and had their union legally ended in January 2020.
Miley - who just recently ended her relationship with Cody Simpson - felt powerless and silenced during her break-up and subsequent divorce from Liam and felt the way to reclaim her voice was through her new music, starting with 'Midnight Sky' which was released on Friday (14.08.20) and her upcoming album 'She Is Miley Cyrus'.
Speaking on Zane Lowe's New Music Daily on Apple Music, she said: "I think all of us are evolving at a speed. I definitely feel the growing pains. I've been feeling even physically kind of constricted in my being. I think all of us are just feeling like we're expanding. We are declaring what we find acceptable and not, where our morals and our values lie. That was really important for me with this record, because talking about 'Midnight Sky' specifically, I felt like my story and my narrative had kind of been told for me over the past year. Obviously, I went through an extremely public break-up and, even more than that, a divorce, and with someone that I had been with for 10 years. That narrative and that experience of ten years was told for me by one day from the eyes of a helicopter.
"I felt kind of villainised. I also felt like I kind of shut down, because it was kind of, respectfully, below me to engage with the press and the media at that time. It felt like I would rather be able to articulate this experience in a poetic way that also I can put back into my art. I never really have engaged. I've only played with the public and the perception in that way.
"So for this record, actually, the way that I even wrote 'Midnight Sky' was I was prepping to create a video for another song. I wrote and directed and conceptualised the video for "Midnight Sky," but it started because I was doing that with another song. Then Andrew Watt, my creative partner, came over and played me this track, and I scratched everything and said, "I've got to write this. This is the foundation of which I feel like I can lay my story on top of that."
Miley knew she needed to "regain" the "power" to tell her side of the story and was determined to do that on her new songs in a way that spoke "directly" to her fans.
As well as having to go through the break-up of her marriage, the former 'Hannah Montana's star Malibu was destroyed in a fire in February 2019 adding to the upheaval and turbulence in her life and all these negative experience have helped her grow as a woman.
She added: "I've always spoken directly to my audience, and I felt like I kind of had lost that connection to my fans, that they were kind of in the dark ... But I went through ... Again, talking about growing pains, I really had to deal with kind of the loss of my home in Malibu. I had to deal with the loss of a love in my life. I had to kind of be human and experience and grow, but then I wanted to tell it directly from my mouth and not from the idea of the public perception, because my story throughout my career has been told through the public perception a lot. I think I just want to regain that power. I think a lot of women are doing that now."
Tagged in Miley Cyrus Liam Hemsworth Zane Lowe