Maybe Miley Cyrus Was Actually Born With It
Miley Cyrus is “truly in the middle of nowhere” on a Friday afternoon, sorting through her entire life so far. “I’m deep in the inventory and organisation,” she tells me, categorising everything from her American Girl dolls to her mum’s Manolos, alongside notebooks where she’s scribbled lyrics, her awards, and the outfits she wore to accept them. Better today than 20 years from now, when there are a hundred more racks to sort. “I’m creating a legacy rack, which is a couple of looks from every era that I would want to be remembered [by],” she reveals. “We just got done playing with the Bob Mackie look from the Grammys.” And now, as the pop mogul announces her new partnership with Maybelline New York, she’ll be adding beauty products to the archive.
On her era work
Cataloguing her “eras” is a wellness practice for Cyrus. “I am joyful when I’m organising and cleaning – it never feels like a task to me,” she admits. “Everything I do in my life is a little bit intense, but it has to be holistic. And that’s why my eras, they’re not a costume, they’re actually like a metamorphosis or a true evolution for me personally,” she explains. When one thing shifts, anything can be subject to change. “I’ve even gained the name ‘Queen of Pristine’, because in every corner, every drawer, every friendship, every family dynamic, everything is just getting an upgrade in the clean-up.”
It’s an emotional experience, too, and “I needed my mom here with me”, she says, in her open, easy manner. “I literally have a dress that I had on when I met my ex-husband, and then I have my dress that I wore on our first date, along with letters and things. I want to savour these kind of beautiful moments of my life, but because these intimate moments have also been public moments, it’s a little bit tough to decide what piece I want to share and what I would ever allow to be seen.” Aware that the digital world can be fleeting (Cyrus points to MySpace disappearing as one example), she says: “These things that are analogue, they really are forever, and that’s something that I’ve also loved about working with Maybelline. It’s a household name. It’s so iconic and it is embedded into all these eras that I love and I really honour.”
On manifesting with “maybe”
There have been lunar shifts happening that Cyrus is aware of lately, too. “I’m very into my moons,” she shares. “I definitely use these opportunities to manifest and to always be very specific with the universe. I’m someone who cares a lot about attention to detail because if you can get what you want or exactly what you’d want, I’d rather get exactly what I want.” That can even translate into language. “Something that I love about Maybelline is that it’s kind of based in maybe, and I think maybe is more of a powerful word than we give it credit for,” Cyrus points out. “Because when you block something with a yes or a no, then you don’t invite in something that could be a maybe. I think people associate me with being a very definitive person. But actually, in regard to spirituality, I am kind of specifically non-specific in everything. At any moment, anyone or anything could change my mind drastically.”
It’s an attitude that enhances her creativity. She remembers herself as a little girl, waiting for a chance to try her mom’s Colossal Mascara (now, she’s the face of their bestselling Sky High Mascara) and being glued to the screen when commercials came on television, “thinking one day I would get to say maybe it’s Maybelline”. Fast-forward to a few months ago, in the studio working on her new Something Beautiful album with a group of live musicians, telling them about her then secret partnership. “We just started playing the jingle and wrote it in the room together,” she says of the “improvised magic” that unfolded. “All I did was kind of plug myself in creatively,” she says. No one asked her to write an original piece of music. “This was just something that I did, I was just inspired.” When I ask if she has a bucket-list-style career dream down the line, live theatre comes to mind. “I don’t know if I’ll ever actually want to do that because I’ve been around it through peers of mine like Pamela Anderson, when she was doing Chicago, I went to one of her opening shows, and I know the effort that it takes.”
Photo by Jacob Bixenman
Photo by Jacob Bixenman
On being a morning, noon and night person
Rest has never been something that Cyrus is really interested in. She even “used to get frustrated with my sleeping friends”, when they didn’t have the same lust for life that she has when she opens her eyes in the morning. “Now I realise that turning on the way that I do is as hard for them as it is for me to turn off,” she says. “I’m a morning person, and unfortunately, I’m kind of a night person too. I am in the best mood the second that my eyes are open, and it’s unbearable for anyone else around,” she says. Even though she has a lot of energy without caffeine, coffee is “an absolute must”. But the order changes as consistently as her eras. “Today I’m a weirdo that did a cold brew and used regular, degular milk, no special processed thing from the tree. It is just from a regular old cow.”
A “wellness practice I can’t live without right now is digital detox”, she says. Her phone isn’t even allowed in the bedroom. “It’s not the first thing I look at in the morning, and it’s not the last thing that I see at night,” she says of keeping it in the office. “That’s been really crucial for my overall wellbeing.”
On celebrating goodbyes
This year will be about focusing “on not just what I’m doing, but what I’m not doing”, Cyrus says. She’s making “fewer and more meaningful choices”, and feels a sense of responsibility to her fans to only commit to projects that are true and “authentic” to her life. “I love this saying: just because something is ending doesn’t mean that it’s not completed.” Rather than thinking of endings or farewells as failures, she thinks of them as wins. “When you complete a test, you celebrate. When you complete something, you celebrate. And sometimes when we say goodbye to people, places, or things, we kind of look at it with this sense of: it’s over. It’s a failure, it’s a waste – I never look at things like that.”
She’s always been this way. “I was born with – even if it’s delusional – a real steadfast sense of confidence that I have no idea where it comes from,” Cyrus says with a laugh. “I just might not even know what I’m talking about, but I’ll say it with my full chest and mean every syllable of it. Even when I was little, I would just say things as fact when I had no reason to believe in myself in that way, but I just did.”