Miley Cyrus looked back on her Bangerz era — and all the controversy it caused in the early 2010s — in a new cover story for British Vogue published Thursday (May 18).
In the interview, the superstar maintained that she’s “not an attention-seeking person, sitting here as a 30-year-old grown woman” despite the zeitgeist-defining moments of her youth, from that fully nude music video for “Wrecking Ball” to twerking on Robin Thicke in nothing but latex at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards.
“I was creating attention for myself because I was dividing myself from a character I had played,” she explained, referencing her start as Hannah Montana. “Anyone, when you’re 20 or 21, you have more to prove. ‘I’m not my parents.’ ‘I am who I am.’
Cyrus also admitted that she “carried some guilt and shame” for several years after releasing Bangerz because of the public scandal of it all, but these days she gives herself more grace. “Now that I’m an adult, I realize how harshly I was judged,” she tells the U.K. magazine. “I was harshly judged as a child by adults and now, as an adult, I realize that I would never harshly judge a child.”
More than a decade on from Bangerz, the singer is still riding the wave of her latest album Endless Summer Vacation and is mammoth lead single, “Flowers.” In fact, just this week, Cyrus unveiled the sultry music video of her latest single off the record, “Jaded,” but that doesn’t mean she’s not looking to new music that will inevitably come in the (possibly near) future. As the profile closes out, she revealed that an unnamed songwriter recently pitched a track for her to record.
“It was like, you know, the standard f–ked up in the club track. And I was like, ‘I’m two years sober. That’s not where I spend my time, you know,’ she explains, adding that the experience inspired her to write a completely different new song with lyrics she teased in the sit-down: “I know I used to be crazy/ I know I used to be fun/ You say I used to be wild/ I say I used to be young.”
Check out Cyrus’ stunning British Vogue cover below.
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