Miley Cyrus Reveals How Pharrell Helped Her Find Herself After ‘Hannah Montana’

Miley Cyrus and Pharrell have been working together for more than a decade, with their most recent collaboration “Doctor (Work It Out)” arriving Friday (March 1), 10 years after the pair first wrote it.  

Over the course of that time, Cyrus has gone through some major changes — perhaps most notably, her transition from teen Disney Channel starlet to the pixie-haired, sometimes controversial 21-year-old who released Bangerz in 2013. And in a new interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music 1, the pop star revealed that Pharrell has been there for her through it all.

“He was really the only one that I could kind of tell him what I really wanted, what I really wanted to make, who I really wanted to be, what I really wanted to do,” Cyrus recalled of meeting the producer back when she was still best known for starring in Hannah Montana. “I think Pharrell was perfect because it was almost like he could be a bumper for me, but he wasn’t going to be a bridle.”

The “Flowers” singer also said that Pharrell was one of the only people who encouraged her famous, drastic haircut in 2012, when she chopped off her long brunette waves and sported a platinum dye job. “I was like, ‘Pharrell, I really want to change. I really want to have a big change,'” Cyrus told Lowe.

“He was kind of the only one — I knew that everyone around me would tell me no — and he was really the only one that I asked, ‘What did he think?'” she added. “And he was like, ‘Go for it today, tomorrow, as soon as you can. That sounds like exactly the perfect thing to do.'”

“I’ll never forget just meeting her at a time where people had pegged her to be one thing particularly,” chimed in the “Happy” musician. “She was Hannah Montana at the time, and she was growing up and really wanting to experience life no matter how far the precipice was, that was her … I just remember her just being in a place where no one really understood what she was, and I got it.”

During the interview, the duo also confirmed that “Doctor (Work It Out)” started as an outtake from Bangerz, which featured a few other Pharrell-produced tracks such as “4×4” featuring Nelly and “#GetItRight.” Earlier this year, they decided to finally give it a proper release.

“We just believe so much in timing and in everything happening when it’s supposed to,” Cyrus told Lowe. “Around the Grammys, Pharrell and I were talking about putting the song out, and it just felt like it was so serendipitous, and there were so many alignments and so many moments that made me know that now was the perfect time.”

“And then sometimes things in our past make more sense in our present than they ever did then,” she continued. “And so this song, I think the nature, the celebration, the feeling, especially with the video, the joy, the dancing, the letting go, it’s what this song really always needed. I don’t think I could have delivered that at that time [in 2013] … It completely embodies my spirit and my essence at this exact moment.”