Every time I ignore Miley Cyrus for a few months, I try to approach her and her story with new eyes and a new perspective. Which is pretty easy to do, because Miley cycles through her new personalities every year or so. Currently, her personality is: two years sober, 30 years old, blasé, wise beyond her years and performatively self-aware. As I said, I always try to give her a chance, but the most consistent thing about Miley is that she is always exhausting. Miley covers the latest issue of British Vogue and it’s just a rollout of her latest personality. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Her empowerment: “One thing I wouldn’t want this story to become is a complaint of being a woman in the industry. I don’t need this to be a women’s empowerment story. I wear my empowerment at all times. I don’t need to profess it.”

Celebrating the success of “Flowers”: “I’m sober. I don’t drink, I don’t… you know, but I celebrate. It’s like one o’clock in the morning and Lil Nas X walks into the club and he asks me the most interesting question. He said: ‘Are you so anxious about how successful ‘Flowers’ is?’ I was like, ‘No. I might be No1 now, but No2 is on its way.’ Everything is seasonal… A lot of headlines [recently] have said, ‘This is Miley’s moment.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s exactly what it is. It’s a moment. And it will be over.’ That’s not pessimistic. That’s honest and that’s OK with me. I actually prefer it. I don’t like to stay big.”

She really wasn’t paying attention to the charts: “My boyfriend brings his phone and I don’t bring one. I had no way of knowing what number it would [chart at], and it wasn’t of importance to me because it wouldn’t have changed anything. Someone could say, ‘It would be this number if you did that, or this number if you sell your soul…’ I’ve been in the Garden of Eden before and I’ve taken the red apple, and it never feels good.”

She’s not attention-seeking: “I’m actually not an attention-seeking person, sitting here as a 30-year-old grown woman.”

The fallout from her ‘Bangerz’ persona at the age of 20-21: “I carried some guilt and shame around myself for years because of how much controversy and upset I really caused. Now that I’m an adult, I realise how harshly I was judged. I was harshly judged as a child by adults and now, as an adult, I realise that I would never harshly judge a child.”

She doesn’t like performing anymore: “Like singing for hundreds of thousands of people isn’t really the thing that I love. There’s no connection. There’s no safety… It’s also not natural. It’s so isolating because if you’re in front of 100,000 people then you are alone….After the last [headline arena] show I did [in 2014], I kind of looked at it as more of a question. And I can’t. Not only ‘can’t’. Because can’t is your capability, but my desire. Do I want to live my life for anyone else’s pleasure or fulfilment other than my own? And, you know what…”

Divorcing Liam Hemsworth: “I wouldn’t erase my story or want it to be erased. Having an interesting life makes for interesting storytelling,” she adds, explaining she sees herself more as a novelist, weaving myriad experiences into any given track. A couple of summers back she started dating Maxx Morando, drummer with the band Liily and a gifted songwriter and producer, who she’s made a handful of public outings with. “We got put on a blind date,” she says of how they met. “Well, it was blind for me and not really for him. I thought, ‘The worst that can happen is I leave.’” When he calls mid-interview her phone starts playing “Tyrone” by Erykah Badu. “I call that ‘boyfriend sexy ringtone’,” she says, smiling.

No labels: She’s not big on gender definitions for herself; a few years ago she floated the idea of pansexuality but seems to have evolved beyond the need for a label, personally. She says: “I only hang out with, like, gay men.”

[From British Vogue]

“Now that I’m an adult, I realise how harshly I was judged” – I mean, she was 20-21 years old during the Bangerz era, the twerking/sex show/appropriation era. It was a phase and the “adults” knew it was a phase, and we knew that Miley was wearing cultural blackface for a few years before she dropped that act like a hot potato. I don’t think 20-year-olds are children but I accept that many 20-year-olds are dumb and that they should be judged on a sliding scale. I guess what annoys me the most is that Miley, as always, forgives herself with such ease when she offends people. The biggest lie here is this though: “I’m actually not an attention-seeking person, sitting here as a 30-year-old grown woman.” She said that with a straight f–king face and expected people to say “oh, okay!”

Covers courtesy of British Vogue.