2023 has been a year of incredible music. Not only have we gotten Miley Cyrus' Endless Summer Vacation, Taylor Swift's Speak Now (Taylor's Version) (plus this fall's 1989 (Taylor's Version)), but Miley Cyrus just gave us more music with her new song "Used To Be Young" — and a TikTok series to go with it.
"This is a series inspired by my new song 'Used To Be Young,' where I am going to start at the beginning of my life in 1992 until now in 2023, and we're gonna go through the last 30 years," she says in the kickoff video. She leans back comfortably against the couch, iPad in-hand, and cracks a smile. "I got nowhere to be, b*tch." Neither do we!
One of the moments we're most excited to learn about is how Miley booked Hannah Montana — especially since the role almost went to someone else.
Hannah Montana, which aired on Disney Channel from 2006 to 2011, was one of my favorite shows as a kid. Even though the series had a dreamy pop aesthetic, and plenty of plot holes (how did all of Miley's classmates interact with her on a daily basis and still not recognize her when they met Hannah face-to-face?!! The world will never know), its realistic issues grounded it.
As children, we watched Miley deal with things like sickness, losing a parent, and navigating friendship issues, and it really felt like she was our friend by the series finale. It's crazy to imagine that the role almost went to someone else.
"In 2004, when I was in middle school, I started the auditioning process for Hannah Montana," Miley says in the first video of the TikTok series. "Originally I wasn't auditioning for Hannah, I was auditioning for the best friend Lilly, and they wrote back and asked if I could put myself on tape as Hannah, whose [original name wasn't Miley, but] Chloe."
"I was too small and too young to fit in with that group they had already casted, and so then they filmed the pilot without me," she continues. After around a year, the studio requested to see Miley again. "They called back and said that they wanted to give me another chance, now that I had grown up. And I came to LA to prove to them that I had grown up."
When Hannah Montana aired, it was Disney Channel's highest-rating premiere episode at the time. As the series continued, fans' love for the show — and the characters — only grew. But the stardom Miley felt as Hannah didn't really translate in her real life.
"At the time, I wasn't valued in the way that Hannah was," she says in another TikTok video. "The magic was more in her, and so [my 2007 Meet Miley Cyrus record] was a way that we could help people put the two and two together that, really, the voice behind Hannah was always me."
The album featured Miley's music on one side and Hannah's music on the other, but while fans started to understand that the blonde popstar wasn't a real person, the disconnect between Hannah and Miley continued to develop. Miley has been candid about how detrimental it was to feel like people cared more about Hannah than her.
"The concept of [Hannah Montana] is that when you're this character, when you have this alter ego, you're valuable," she says on an episode of Rock This with Allison Hagendorf. "So, that was drilled into my head, like, ‘without being Hannah Montana, no one cares about you.’ And that was the concept."
The singer followed Meet Miley Cyrus with Breakout, her first standalone album as Miley Cyrus. The albums are bookended by a song that's become a fan favorite: "See You Again."
"'See You Again' was a song that I had written on the Meet Miley record," she says in another TikTok video. "This was really the beginning of me storytelling for my fans. My record label at the time didn't think the song was a hit, so there was never a music video made for it."
But that didn't stop Miley from pouring her heart into it. "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," she continues. "But yes, my record label told me this song wasn't going to be a hit, and my fans decided otherwise. It's always been us."
What's your favorite song from Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus' early career? Let us know in the comments!
Lead image via Carlos Alvarez/Getty Images
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