Fresh off a VMAs 2020 performance of her current single "Midnight Sky," Miley Cyrus has become the latest to sit down with Joe Rogan for a lengthy interview spanning a characteristically wide variety of topics including—but certainly not limited to—her decision to embrace sobriety and her recent divorce from Liam Hemsworth.
At the top of the two-hour interview, the two launched into a brief history of Cyrus' signature voice before making their way into a larger discussion on how her early years on the Disney Channel affected her approach to the art life.
"The balance it trained me to have is something that I don't think you are gonna get taught any other way besides jumping in the deep end of the pool and hoping you know how to swim," Cyrus explained. "That's the only way. There was no way I could have prepared for the amount of balance I would have to learn to kind of teeter. Because at one point, again, it went from, it was school then it went from, you know, how much weed can I actually smoke and play a teenage superstar on the Disney Channel?"
Asked for the answer to that proposed question, Cyrus—who added that undergoing vocal surgery ultimately inspired her to give up smoking—said "more than you would fucking think." She also noted that she has often been made "the face" of these, and other, issues against her will. As for sobriety, she explained that she isn't interested in presenting her chosen lifestyle as the fix-all for anyone else and instead believes that "everyone should experiment" in a safe and responsible way.
About 11 minutes into the discussion, Cyrus mentioned the divorce and focused her criticism on how the relationship was unfairly portrayed in headlines.
"I recently just went through a very public divorce that fucking sucked," she said. "What really sucked about it wasn't the fact that me and someone that I loved realized that we don't love each other the way that we used to anymore. That's OK. I can accept that. I can't accept the villainizing and the, just, all those stories. It's just amazing to me that the public kind of thinks that there's no gap of time that they didn't see that could possibly be what led to this. Like, it's not 'One day you were happy on the [red] carpet and the next day you were making out with your friend in Italy, what the fuck?' There was a lot of time in between that that you didn't see."
Miley credited her father Billy Ray Cyrus with having offered up some sound advice with regards to how to best interact with such headline portrayals. Billy Ray, notably, famously received similar advice from the late legend Johnny Cash.
Toward the end of the interview, Cyrus likened staying in a relationship out of sheer comfort to addiction, a topic she and Rogan discussed at length while citing a number of books focused on its effects in modern life.
"It can happen with things like love," she said. "I've even felt that too. When it's, like, been the most stressful times in my life, I can't reach for drugs anymore, I don't want to reach for bad food. Alright, I'm gonna reach for someone to love me." Cyrus added that, when people are in love, "you do feel like you're high on drugs" during those early months. "It's the same drip," she said.
From there, Cyrus got more specific when noting the hangover-like effects of finding yourself in that situation.
"Actually, [the one] I called the love of mine who I was with and we got divorced, it was almost like a pacifier," she told Rogan. "It was that thing that I just needed. Not because we were in love anymore but because of the comfort and because my brain said 'Oh, this feels better, this is comforting.' But actually, knowing that I was giving in to an addiction made me feel way worse. I had the hangover. … It felt like a relapse every time I'd go back."
Catch the full Cyrus x Rogan interview up top. And below, revisit that VMAs performance of "Midnight Sky."
