Miley Cyrus shared a few details about influences inspiring the visual album she hopes to release next year in a new interview with Harpers Bazaar.
Chief among them, Cyrus said, is Pink Floyd’s masterpiece, The Wall. Cyrus said she’s been a fan of the classic rock opera since she, her brothers, and a good friend saw it as teenagers, renting out a limo, donning big fur coats, and getting (of course) very high.
“We really leaned in,” Cyrus recalled. “And so I have this heart-first attachment to it. My idea was making The Wall, but with a better wardrobe and more glamorous and filled with pop culture.”
As her collaborations with the Flaming Lips proved, Cyrus has never shied from experimentation and psychedelia. She went on to call her new project a “hypnotizing and glamorous” concept album “that’s an attempt to medicate somewhat of a sick culture through music.”
Another major influence is the 2018 Nicolas Cage horror movie Mandy. Cyrus loved the movie so much that she named one of her dogs, Mandy. She even thought about remaking it as a musical, with her starring in the Cage role. (In the original, he plays a lumberjack seeking vengeance on the cult that killed his girlfriend.)
“I love that it’s a romance revenge story,” Cyrus said. “Romance and revenge—those are some of the greatest tragedies. I forever and always will be interested in those.”
Cyrus reached out to Mandy director Panos Cosmatos to pursue the remake. But while that fell through, Cosmatos stuck around to help Cyrus develop the new visual album. He described it as “more experimental than anything she’s ever done, but in a pop way that I love.”
Cyrus’ other main collaborator is producer Shawn Everett, who worked on her last album, Endless Summer Vacation, and has credits with Alabama Shakes/Brittany Howard, the War on Drugs, and Julian Casablancas + The Voidz. Their process together often involves Cyrus bringing in references from the worlds of art or fashion to give a sense of what she wants the music to evoke.
“She’ll want it to feel like this specific runway show or something,” Everett said. “I love when she talks like that. For me, it opens up a whole world.”
Speaking of the interplay between the visuals and music, Cyrus said the former is “driving” the latter. “It was important for me that every song has these healing sound properties,” she continued. “The songs, whether they’re about destruction or heartbreak or death, they’re presented in a way that is beautiful, because the nastiest times of our life do have a point of beauty. They are the shadow, they are the charcoal, they are the shading. You can’t have a painting without highlights and contrast.”
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