“Sobriety is like my God. I need it, I live for it. It’s changed my whole life,” Miley Cyrus told Zane Lowe in May, and it’s precisely her strong will to stay sober that keeps the singer away from touring. “I have the physical ability and the opportunities to tour. I wish I had the desire to tour, but I don’t. Plus, I don’t think there’s an infrastructure that supports artists,” the singer said on Good Morning America, where she has been promoting her new album, Something Beautiful.
“Artists like Prince lived such an intense lifestyle being on tour… It’s very hard to maintain sobriety when you’re on tour, which is a fundamental pillar of my stability,” assured Miley, who quit smoking marijuana and drinking because of a vocal cord operation. As she explained to Variety, it was a tough task. “It’s really hard because especially being young there’s this stigma that ‘you’re not fun anymore.’ It’s like ‘honey, you can call me a lot of things, but I know I’m fun.’ What I really enjoy about sobriety is being able to wake up 100% all the time. I don’t want to wake up groggy. I want to wake up feeling ready,” she said.
Now she has explained that it’s not easy to maintain mental health while on tour either. “You have thousands of people screaming at you. You take a dopamine bath and feel a lot of love, but you completely fall apart at the end of the concert. You start to think that it’s not enough for just one person to love you – it’s got to be 10,000 or 80,000!” he said.
In 2023, she explained to fans she would not to go on tour, although then the reasons were more related life on a tour bus. “This has nothing to do with a lack of appreciation for the fans, but simply that I don’t want to get ready in a dressing room or sleep on a moving bus,” she wrote on social media.
The singer recently performed alongside Beyoncé and as she clarifies, that’s a clear sign that it’s not exactly fear that keeps her from performing in front of thousands of people. “When you’re next to her, you can really feel her desire and her passion,” she added.
Originally published in Vanity Fair Spain
