Is Miley Cyrus’s chart-topping single “Flowers” about her relationship with ex-husband Liam Hemsworth? A gentlewoman never tells! However, in her cover interview with British Vogue, the 30-year-old pop star did reveal that the song originally had a very different message.
By now you’ve probably heard “Flowers” a thousand times since its release in January, but just in case, here’s a refresher on the chorus lyrics.
Empowering, right?! But it wasn’t always. In fact, it used to be really, really sad.
“I wrote it in a really different way,” Cyrus said. “The chorus was originally: ‘I can buy myself flowers, write my name in the sand, but I can’t love me better than you can.’ It used to be more, like, 1950s. The saddest song. Like: ‘Sure, I can be my own lover, but you’re so much better.’”
In the end, she decided she’d rather win than wallow. “The song is a little fake it till you make it,” she added. “Which I’m a big fan of.”
Elsewhere in the interview Cyrus rebuffed the idea that her album Endless Summer Vacation is some kind of diary meant to be interpreted literally, or that her music videos and album rollout are littered with clues about her past.
“I never need to be a master at the craft of tricking an audience,” she said. “It will set itself on fire all by itself.”
She may never admit it, but some of the conclusions drawn by her fans seemed a little too on the nose to be purely coincidental. Releasing Endless Summer Vacation on Hemsworth’s birthday was an accident? Mmm-kay. Then there’s the lyric “Built a home and watched it burn,” which appears to directly reference the former couple’s Malibu home that was destroyed the Wolsey fire in 2018.
Other theories are a little more outlandish. It’s difficult to prove, for example, that her lyrical references to Bruno Mars’s “When I Was Your Man” in “Flowers” were because Hemsworth had allegedly dedicated the song to her at one point. Or that Cyrus wears Hemsworth’s old tuxedo jacket in the accompanying music video. (“She has no time for any of this,” writes British Vogue‘s Giles Hattersley.)
Cyrus doesn’t owe her fans an explanation, and she’s made it clear she’s not giving one any time soon. She’s too busy bein’ Miley.
