Miley Cyrus has reflected on her infamous feud with Sinead O’Connor as she dedicated a song to the late singer.
The Irish musician penned an open letter to Cyrus after she said her nudity-filled video for hit song Wrecking Ball was inspired by O’Connor’s Nothing Compares 2 U music video.
“This is a dangerous world. We don’t encourage our daughters to walk around naked in it because it makes them prey for animals and less than animals, a distressing majority of whom work in the music industry and its associated media,” wrote O’Connor.
Cyrus didn’t take to kindly to the criticism and responded by re-sharing O’Connor’s tweets about trying to find a mental health treatment facility in Ireland.
O’Connor later demanded that Cyrus apologise for mocking her battle with mental illness.
Ten years have passed since and Cyrus has had a lot of time to think about what went down.
She spoke about the incident during her one-hour TV special titled Endless Summer Vacation: Continued (Backyard Sessions), which aired on ABC on Thursday.
“A lot has happened,” Cyrus began. “Wrecking Ball, I had already had the demo, and I had taken this song, actually, to multiple producers who didn’t hear its potential and told me they didn’t think it fit Bangerz. So I called the Party In The USA guy and go, ‘’Let’s do it again’’,’ Miley said.
“So at the time when I made Wrecking Ball, I was expecting for there to be controversy and backlash, but I don’t think I expected other women to put me down or turn on me, especially women that had been in my position before,”Miley said.
“So this is when I had received an open letter from Sinéad O’Connor, and I had no idea about the fragile mental state that she was in. And I was also only 20 years old. So I could really only wrap my head around mental illness so much. And all that I saw was that another woman had told me that this idea was not my idea.
“And even if I was convinced that it was, it was still just, you know, men in power’s idea of me. And they had manipulated me to believe that it was my own idea when it never really was. And it was. And it is. And I still love it,” Cyrus said.
She noted that “younger childhood triggers and traumas” come up in “weird and odd ways”.
“And I think I had just been judged for so long for my own choices that I was just exhausted. And I was in this place where I finally was making my own choices and my own decisions. And to have that taken away from me deeply upset me.
“God bless Sinéad O’Connor for real, in all seriousness,” Cyrus concluded.
Cyrus then dedicated the song Wonder Woman from her new album Endless Summer Vacation in honor of O’Connor, who died in July aged 56.
