Witnessing a century-defining artist in real time
Review of Miley Cyrus’ Endless Summer Vacation
Miley Cyrus — Endless Summer Vacation
Released March 10, 2023
Earlier this year, Miley Cyrus won her very first Grammy for her song “Flowers” and her live performance of the song on the night was everything. Not only has she been long overdue for her own flowers and I’m so genuinely happy for her, but I’m also ecstatic that she’s receiving critical praise for this album. I’ll admit, I loved Cyrus during her time on the Disney Channel, I was a big Hannah Montana fan and especially loved the dual Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus album, but when she started branching out and making more adult-sounding music, I lost interest. I was of course aware of her subsequent albums, it’s not like I lived under a rock, but I wasn’t taken aback by her shock-jock phase during the Bangerz album, which featured major hits like “Wrecking Ball” and “We Can’t Stop.” In truth, I just didn’t think much of her again until she released “Malibu” from 2017’s Younger Now. When that song was released, I was starting to pay closer attention to new pop releases and really genuinely enjoyed the song, plus I was happy for Cyrus personally that she seemed to be in a better place mentally and emotionally. But then I didn’t think about her much again. I always meant to look further into Plastic Hearts, her glam rock inspired album, but never got around to it. But I do remember surrounding that album hearing other artists and critics talk about her voice — how strong it is, how powerful she is at wielding it, and how much of an artist she really is. Underneath all the controversy, I always knew that she was a talented singer, that was never in question. All I needed to hear was that backyard session of her singing her godmother’s song “Jolene.” Now with this album, her eighth studio release, we can officially add songwriter to that list of Cyrus’ talents.
Around two years ago, I heard on a whim her song “Slide Away” from her 2019 She Is Coming 7 song album. That’s when I started paying more critical attention to Cyrus as a serious vocalist and artist, not just provocateur. Between the vocal performance, the production, and the sharp, vulnerable songwriting, I really feel like that song in particular was just the beginning of the Cyrus we hear on this record.
Despite this wild child reputation Cyrus has, whether in some part real and some part embellished, or entirely thrust upon her by the industry, the media, and the general public, she has always been truthful about who she is at any given time in her music and we’ve gotten to see her grow and change, make mistakes and evolve in real time. A huge part of this inner glimpse we’ve gotten is into her relationship with Australian actor Liam Hemsworth. First meeting on the set of The Last Song in 2010 when they were 17 and 19, respectively, Cyrus and Hemsworth have had a tumultuous on-again-off-again relationship through the years, leading to marriage in 2018. That marriage ended in 2020, and both are with new partners, but we as the public have followed Cyrus’ emotional side of the story through their relationship the whole time. This album, written during and released after their divorce was final, serves as the final post-mortem of Cyrus’ most significant and long-term public relationship.
This album also stands out and may seem like a bigger sonic shift from her last project than her past shifts because this is Cyrus’ first album with Columbia, which she signed to in 2021 after leaving RCA. Where Plastic Hearts was more of a glam rock vibe, taking inspiration from great rock vocalists like Debbie Harry, Dolores O’Riordan, and Joan Jett, this new era is a much more chill, laid back vibe. Cyrus described this album as a “very personal body of work,” and as “her love letter to LA,” the city which saw her through the “physical and mental growth she experienced during production.” The album is also structured to be heard as if taking place over a full day with the first half representing the morning, “where there’s a buzz and energy and…a potential of new possibilities” while the second half represents the “slinky, seediness” of the night “and kind of a grime but a glamour at the same time.”
My favorite tracks on this album are “Flowers,” “Jaded,” “You,” “River,” “Violet Chemistry,” “Island,” and “Wonder Woman.”
The now-Grammy winning song “Flowers” is like the antidote to Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World.” Perry’s song sounds like it’s about 10 years too late, but “Flowers” sounds more like the empowered anthem that resonates with today’s women and girls more than “Woman’s World” was ever going to be.
“Jaded” honestly blew me away. From the vocals to the songwriting, this song is honest, raw, and vulnerable. It’s obvious she still has so much love for this person, but she’s ready to accept her part and move on. She knows now that she can’t fix anyone, but what she can control is her. In my book, this is the ultimate break up song.
It’d be easy to interpret this whole album to be about the breakdown and aftermath of her relationship with ex-husband Hemsworth, but “Used to Be Young” makes so much more sense to me if you look at it through the lens of being about her fans and the public. I can imagine it’s difficult being known for wild, defiant behavior and making a career of it, then turning 30 and realizing that you can’t keep up that behavior forever. But then how do you go about changing that public narrative and how do you handle disappointing those who have supported you through that phase? It’s a classic conundrum that we’ve seen before from artists who start out their careers with one persona, but then find that persona to be unsustainable so then they have to pivot. Bowie did it, killing off Ziggy Stardust before moving to Berlin, then became a massive pop star before shifting again. Gaga too had to hang up the meat dress before we got Joanne and duets with Tony Bennett. What weathers these artists through these transitions, and what will weather Cyrus through too, is the genuine, bona fide talent and artistic vision that lies beneath every decision, every shift. Nothing is accidental, and the fact that Cyrus has a producing credit on this song shows that whatever comes next for her, she’s got both hands on the wheel.
Many of the songs on this album are produced by the team of Tyler Johnson and Kid Harpoon, who I became aware of through their continuous collaboration with Harry Styles. If you groan whenever you hear the name Harry Styles, forget everything you know about him — his boyband past, his personal public dating, controversies over his fashion or identity, his largely female fanbase. Regardless of any of that, his work is objectively very good pop music and a large part of that is because of the collaborators he surrounds himself with, which includes Johnson and Harpoon. Now, they’re lending their talents and collaborating with Cyrus, another generational powerhouse pop artist and I think their contributions make all the difference. She’s still working with Greg Kurstin and Mike Will Make It on this album, as they’ve worked on her last few projects, but as a team with Cyrus’ vision, Johnson, Harpoon, Kurstin, and Mike create a sound that’s tightly polished pop but still with some Cyrus flair.
Also on this album are a few features, namely “Thousand Miles” with Brandi Carlile and “Muddy” with Sia. Personal disclosure, I’m just not a fan of Sia’s. Her controversies aside, I just don’t vibe with her songs from a vocal, artistic, or songwriting perspective. So it shouldn’t be all that surprising that this wasn’t one of my favorite songs from this album. I didn’t think it was bad, but it was just fine. “Thousand Miles,” on the other hand, I enjoyed because I am a fan of Brandi Carlile’s. Not only do I love Carlile as a songwriter and an artist, but she seems like a genuinely good person with good intentions and she works so hard to uplift other artists. It also seems like every artist I love loves her and she’s never more than 3 degrees of separation of any artist I’m listening to. I would have loved to have heard more of Carlile on this track in particular and seeing that she wasn’t included on the writing credits for this song, I would love to hear what happens when Cyrus and Carlile actually sit down to write a song together.
My least favorite moment on the album is on “Handstand.” I’m not a fan of the spoken part at the very beginning, and for me it ruins the cohesion of the album. But by the time I got to “Violet Chemistry,” I was thinking this was more like it.
Like much of this album, “Wildcard” is vulnerable, honest, and it’s obvious what it’s about.
“Island” is my number one pick for this album, which is saying something considering how much I loved “Flowers.” But the sound on this track is truly unique, I can’t think of anything to compare it to, but I can imagine more songs in the future will be taking inspiration from its style.
I have yet to mention Cyrus’ vocal performance on this record. This credit is usually given to Plastic Hearts, but I think a case could be made for this project being the best vocals of Cyrus’ recorded career thus far. Particularly on the demo version of “Flowers” that’s featured at the end of this album, before all the production gets added in, it shows the raw power of her voice, which can sometimes get muddled in conversations about her personal life or her wild performances, but by including this demo, she’s making sure we never forget how strong of a singer she is again.
I was particularly blown away by the performance on “Wonder Woman.” The sadness in her voice on that track also made me think of the scene in Love Actually when Emma Thompson’s character cries to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.” In fact, if they ever remade that movie, I’d pitch “Wonder Woman” as the song for that scene.
In addition to her stellar vocals, this album also shows Cyrus coming into her own as a songwriter. Like some of the best pop songwriters out there, she knows how to write about her personal relationships and experiences and make the feelings and observations she has about them universal. She’s also showing vulnerability by writing very candidly about her very public relationship and subsequent divorce. I wouldn’t blame her if she decided she wanted to deal with it privately, but she decided to work through it in her art and then shared that art with us knowing it would get dissected, knowing it would be scrutinized, but it looks like the risk paid off.
We know Cyrus has never been a stranger to controversy. For much of her career, it seems like the public has been offended by her for one reason and then another. But I wonder how much of that controversy kept audiences from seeing her as the artist she is. In many respects, she is one of the truest artists in the truest sense of the word. The way she has experimented with sound, aesthetic, style, she’s never made the same album twice. It’s only now that there’s no gimmick that we, myself included, have taken her work seriously and see her talent and her creative vision which has been there the whole time. I think when future generations look back to the music of the early 21st century, we’ll have to contend with how we treated her for much of her early career as headline and clickbait fodder, rather than treating her like an actual artist.
Recent headlines have included the news that Cyrus and her collaborators are being sued by one of the songwriting rights holders of Bruno Mars’ “When I Was Your Man” for “unauthorized exploitation” of Mars’ song in “Flowers.” Tempo Music Investments, who brought the suit, own a portion of the rights to Mars’ song after purchasing them from one of the four songwriters, Philip Lawrence and claim Cyrus’ song “duplicates numerous melodic, harmonic, and lyrical elements of ‘When I Was Your Man,’ including the melodic pitch design and sequence of the verse, the connecting bass-line, certain bars of the chorus, certain theatrical music elements, lyric elements, and specific chord progressions,” Tempo claims “It is undeniable based on the combination and number of similarities between the two recordings that ‘Flowers’ would not exist without ‘When I Was Your Man,’” and saying that “Flowers” is a “derivative work” of “When I Was Your Man” that was created “without authorization.” While I am not an Intellectual Property lawyer, nor by any means an expert from taking one college class, my understanding is that the fact of Cyrus’ song being a “derivative work” is stipulated, no one doesn’t think that the songs aren’t related. But the criteria for bringing a suit like this is two-pronged: access and substantial similarity. Access is just like it sounds, did the offending artist have access to the original piece of music that it could be reasonably plausible that they might have stolen from the filing artist. We know that Cyrus and her collaborators were aware of Mars’ song, and particularly in the digital age of streaming, it would be harder to prove they weren’t aware of the song. The second prong, substantial similarity, is tricky because while common, basic elements of music cannot be copyrighted, the way I’ve thought of and understood substantial similarity is if a reasonable person would mistake the offending piece of music for the original piece, than the similarity is substantial. Besides the issue of what constitutes a “reasonable” person, which is an abstract and hard to define standard, my initial thought is that no one would hear “Flowers” and think they were hearing “When I Was Your Man,” even with the numerous duplicated elements. Unlike with “Under Pressure” and “Ice Ice Baby,” which you could understandably mistake one for the other for the first few seconds of the song, I don’t think the issue is whether or not they are similar, we know that they are, but the issue is whether the elements that have been duplicated are more advanced than basic musical elements and would need to be copyright protected. I’ll be interested to see the legal arguments from the actual barred lawyers on both sides, and the decision made by the judge, but from my albeit limited understanding, I can’t imagine this suit will go very far.
Despite this being Cyrus’ most critically well received work of her career, and the one she finally won a Grammy for, some reviews thought the lyrics were “nondescript” or that while each track is worth a listen, “the majority of them aren’t worthy of a replay either.” Another reviewer called it a “perfectly fine record,” but it “ultimately suffers from how safe it is.” Regardless of how you might feel about Cyrus personally, I don’t think anyone could say she’s an artist who’s afraid of being too “safe” or fears change. Like other groundbreaking pop acts like Bowie, Madonna (who served as an inspiration for the album cover), and Gaga, Cyrus isn’t content to just stay in one place. And while some fans may even miss a “more edgy Miley,” even when she moves on from this style, we’ll always have this album to come back to. Similar to the generally negative consensus around Kacey Musgraves’ star-crossed which was in the unfortunate position of following up beloved Golden Hour, not every Musgraves album can be Golden Hour. And not every Cyrus album is going to be “Wrecking Ball” or Plastic Hearts. A major component to Cyrus’ artistry is this slinky, never-standing-still style, which some have described as “flighty”, but like a reviewer for Stereogum wrote, they see her as having “range and killer taste.” To wish Cyrus would stay in one place stylistically is to fundamentally misunderstand her work and not actually like her as an artist, just as a character. It’s her versatility that makes her the artist she is, and when we look back in 20 years and regard her as a century-defining artist, won’t we feel silly for wishing she had just stayed in one place?
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go watch that Grammys performance of “Flowers” again.
