Just Being Miley
The track became the singer’s first top 10 hit
In 2007, Miley Cyrus was a 14-year-old TV star better known as her character, Hannah Montana, than as singer Miley Cyrus. But much like her onscreen Hannah Montana persona, she felt she was stuck in an identity crisis where people didn’t know the real her. As she explains in a new TikTok, she tried to differentiate the two on her first record — a double album where one disc was titled Hannah Montana 2 and the other was Meet Miley Cyrus. But for as much as she believed in her Meet Miley material, specifically the first single, “See You Again,” her label, the Disney-owned Hollywood Records, didn’t see it the same way.
“My record label at the time didn’t think the song was a hit, so there was never a music video made for it,” she says in the latest installment of her “Used to Be Young” TikTok series. “I wrote that song in a way that would feel really personal to Miley so there would be no confusion between me and the character. But yes, my record label told me that the song wasn’t gonna be a hit. And my fans decided otherwise. It’s always been us.” The track ended up making it into Billboard’s Top 10.
As she watches a YouTube of herself performing the track, she gets into the groove, saying, “Work, work, work.” “Hannah’s for kids,” she says, “Miley’s for grown-ass men in heels.” She also explained how she made the song, which blends moody verses with chanted choruses with lyrics like, “She’s just being Miley.”
“I had my own name in the song,” she says. “I say my best friend Leslie in the song. And so this was really the beginning of me storytelling for my fans.”
When Rolling Stone ranked the 50 best Miley Cyrus songs, “See You Again” placed at number nine. “If it were only the vehicle for her eventual catch-all phrase ‘She’s just being Miley,’ this crushed-out jam would be worthy of inclusion on this list,” the blurb about the song says. “But it’s also a fine launching point for her post-Disney career, and one of the stronger entrants in the late-aughts microgenre of growing-up pop.”