Miley Cyrus was trying to figure out who she was after Hannah Montana, and Pharrell Williams stepped in to guide her.
“He was really the only one that I could kind of tell him what I really wanted, what I really wanted to make, who I really wanted to be, what I really wanted to do,” Cyrus, 31, said during a Friday, March 1, interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1. “I think Pharrell was perfect because it was almost like he could be a bumper for me, but he wasn’t going to be a bridle.”
Cyrus explained that Williams, 50, came to her home when she was 17 or 18 years old for a meeting and wanted to know what she had planned after wrapping up Hannah Montana. The producer told her he had a “vision” for her as an artist. Williams revealed that he saw potential in her and could do so much more than what she was pegged to as a Disney star.
“I’ll never forget just meeting her at a time where people had pegged her to be one thing particularly,” Williams reflected. “She was Hannah Montana at the time, and she was growing up and really wanting to experience life no matter how far the precipice was, that was her … I just remember her just being in a place where no one really understood what she was, and I got it.”
Before the Disney series ended in 2011, Cyrus already had a taste of the music industry as she released the album Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus in 2007 where she debuted herself outside of her TV persona. The following year, she dropped her second studio album, Breakout.
As Cyrus started to find her voice, she began to transition toward a different sound with her 2009 EP, The Time of Our Lives. She continued to push against the mold when she dropped her album Can’t Be Tamed in 2010.
While Cyrus experimented with her artistry, she felt the need to push it even more. Despite not working with Williams right away after their initial meeting, they kept in contact. As Cyrus struggled to figure out what was next for her, she reached out to Williams for advice.
“I was like, ‘Pharrell, I really want to change. I really want to have a big change,’” Cyrus told Lowe on Friday. “He was kind of the only one — I knew that everyone around me would tell me no — and he was really the only one that I asked, ‘What did he think?’ And he was like, ‘Go for it today, tomorrow, as soon as you can. That sounds like exactly the perfect thing to do.’”
After having that conversation, Cyrus followed through. She chopped off her hair and entered into her Bangerz era, which featured some of Cyrus’ biggest songs including “Wrecking Ball” and “We Can’t Stop.”
Williams served as a producer on the 2013 album. The pair also collaborated on the song “Doctor (Work It Out)” at the time. While the track didn’t make it to the album, Cyrus and Williams dropped the track on Friday more than a decade after it was created.
