Miley Cyrus found her entire world shifted once she stopped drinking and doing drugs.
“I’ve learned this about myself over the years: sobriety is, like, that’s like my God,” Cyrus, 32, said during a Wednesday, May 21, interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I need it, I live for it. I mean, that [has] changed my entire life.”
The “Something Beautiful” singer stopped using marijuana in 2017 and drinking alcohol in 2020. While speaking to 51-year-old Lowe, Cyrus acknowledged the last time they sat down for an Apple Music interview.
“When you came to my psychedelic house that was painted black in Hidden Hills, where everything is all-white homes and equestrian. Then, I painted mine black and rainbow, and [now] I no longer live there,” Cyrus quipped. “But, I was happy you came and saw me in that space. I was thinking about it a lot today as I was on my way here, because I was so close to who’s sitting here right now, but there was just life. It had more to teach me. It had more lessons.”
During Cyrus’ 2020 interview with Lowe, she admitted that she “fell off” her sobriety journey during the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdown.
“I know I needed to fall one more time,” Cyrus explained on Wednesday. “It just never would have happened this way. I just never would have been sitting here, and there were times in that section from when I’ve seen you last time and now that they hurt, I’m not proud of them.”
She added, “Definitely not my best moments, not some of my best work, any of that. But, it all led me to writing ‘Flowers,’ which then was some sort of key right into the lock of all healing. It healed me so much.”
Cyrus released “Flowers” in 2023 about her divorce from ex-husband Liam Hemsworth.
“It’s like a modern ‘I Will Survive’ in some ways,” Lowe mused, referring to Gloria Gaynor’s 1978 breakup anthem. “And then it allows you to create this body of work.”
“Flowers” went on to win two Grammy Awards in February 2024, which was equally “healing” for Cyrus.
“I think somewhere inside of me I needed maybe to hold a trophy and just feel for a moment that I have something that I can hold in my hands that feels like a true achievement,” she said. “Because after every album I’ve been able to say, ‘Well, I did what I came here to do and I made the album that I set out to make and that’s enough.’ Maybe it’s the kid in me. I don’t know what it was, but I needed something to hold that made me feel like I had really won. And so at the Grammys, that’s why I went. It was actually for healing. And funny enough, I’m happy I’m talking to you of all people, because I wasn’t going to go to the Grammys. I wasn’t going to perform at the Grammys for sure because as everybody was post-pandemic, I was struggling with a lot of anxiety.”
Cyrus continued, “I never wrote a song thinking, ‘I want to get a Grammy,’ but receiving that Grammy for ‘Flowers’ felt more like a band-aid on a broken heart in some way. And so, once I received my Grammy, I was like, ‘Look, when you Google me, it says Miley Cyrus, a Grammy Award-winning artist. I’m going to go make some of my weird that I like to make.’”
