Miley finds freedom with her Dead Petz
Controversial pop star reimagines her role in culture with new album
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,” Cyrus, 22, said at her home studio a week before the show, at which she served as host, enthusiastically goofing on her reputation for wearing provocative costumes, speaking freely and using drugs. She used the night to take full advantage of the commercial platform to debut a different, decidedly non-commercial 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, anythinggoes ethos is more than a retail strategy; it’s her all-encompassing esthetic and lifestyle. And while she is operating outside of her label contract, 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,” Cyrus screamed during the unannounced VMAs 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, Cyrus was vibrating with excitement to share her pure, updated view of the world.
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,’ ” Cyrus said. “Now it’s been long enough where they’re like, ‘No one’s telling her what to do.’ ”
Cursing as though she were in a Tarantino movie, 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, Cyrus was hospitalized for more than a week in Kansas with a severe allergic reaction to antibiotics. There she was visited by 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,” Cyrus continued, “I really think, in a way, his energy went into Wayne’s energy. What he was to me, Wayne has become.”
Whereas Bangerz saw a freshly unfettered pop renegade experimenting with her new-found power, 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.
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.”
“When I made Bangerz, it was as true to me then as this record is now,” Cyrus said. “It just happened naturally in my head. It’s like anything: styles just change.” Atlanta producer Mike WiLL Made-It, who contributed some of the strongest songs here, said he saw in Cyrus an organic need to regenerate. “Why would she drop another Bangerz? Miley is the new Madonna,” he said.
In 2014, Cyrus founded the Happy Hippie Foundation, a non-profit for homeless and LGBTQ youth, which she said has helped with her selfdiscovery. “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 Coyne. “He’s everything in the world; you can’t even define us,” Cyrus said. “I am 100 per cent in love with Wayne, and Wayne is in love with me, but it’s nothing sexual in any way. That would be the grossest.”
It was the personal, homemade nature of the project — and Coyne’s non-traditional career with the Flaming Lips — that persuaded 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.
Cyrus said it’s hard to imagine fitting again into a mainstream mould. “I don’t think I’ll grow that way,” she said. “It seems like it would be backwards.”
Still, “This music was not meant to be a rebellion,” she said. “It was meant to be a gift.”