Miley Cyrus has explained why she doesn’t find touring to be “healthy” for her.
The singer decided to take a break from performing in May 2023, stating: “I can’t do another arena tour.”
Explaining that “singing for hundreds of thousands of people isn’t really the thing that I love”, Cyrus said: “After the last show I did, I kind of looked at it as more of a question. And I can’t. Do I want to live my life for anyone else’s pleasure or fulfilment other than my own?”
The news divided fans, which prompted the singer to release a statement, which said that her decision did not stem from “a lack of appreciation for” her followers.
Now, in a new interview shared on her TikTok, the former Hannah Montana star has opened up about the negative impact touring has on her.
She said that “what people don't really understand about touring” is that “the show is only 90 minutes, but that's your life”.
Cyrus continued: “If you’re performing at a certain level of intensity and excellence, there should be an equal amount of recovery and rest.
“There's a level of ego that gets overused when I’m on tour and once that switches on, it's hard to turn it off. And I think when you’re training your ego every single night to be active, that’s the hardest switch for me to turn off.”
She added: “Having every day the relationship between you and other humans being subject and observer isn’t healthy for me because it erases my humanity and my connection. And without my humanity and my connection, I can’t be a songwriter, which is my priority.”
Miley Cyrus has explained why touring isn’t ‘healthy’ for her— (TikTok)
Elsewhere in the chat, Cyrus revealed that Adele was the inspiration behind her new song “Used to Be Young”, and also reflected on the open letter written by late Irish singer Sinead O’Connor about Cyrus’s video for “Wrecking Ball”.
Following the video’s release, Cyrus said she had been inspired by the visuals for O’Connor’s 1990 hit “Nothing Compares 2 U”, in which the artist could be singing directly to the camera in various close-up shots.
Writing to the then-20-year-old “in the spirit of motherliness and with love”, O’Connor said it wasn’t “‘cool’ to be naked and licking sledgehammers in your videos”, and warned Cyrus not to let herself be “pimped” by the music industry.
In response, Cyrus proceeded to make fun of past tweets by O’Connor, which had been sent at a time when she was struggling with her mental health, and compared O’Connor to former Nickelodeon child star Amanda Bynes, who was also struggling with mental health issues.
“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,” Cyrus recalled.
MIley Cyrus— (Getty Images)
“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.”
Growing emotional as she discussed her response, Cyrus continued: “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.
“Even if I was convinced that it was, it was still just 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.”
