Disney prevented Miley Cyrus from performing songs from Hannah Montana after the show ended in 2011. But she said in a new interview with The Ringer podcast, “It’s not like I wanted to.” She explained: “Performing ‘The Best of Both Worlds’ between ‘We Can’t Stop’ and ‘Wrecking Ball’ wouldn’t have really made sense,” she said.
The TV series, which propelled Cyrus to stardom as a pop star who hid her true identity from fans so she could live a normal life, ran from 2006 to 2011. During that time, five Hannah Montana soundtrack albums came out, as well as one live record and two remix albums. She also released three solo albums on Disney’s Hollywood label* before switching to RCA and releasing Bangerz, home to “We Can’t Stop” and “Wrecking Ball,” in 2013. Around that time, she sexualized her performances more, twerking with Robin Thicke at the 2013 VMAs. So, apparently, Disney decided she could enjoy the best of only one world.
Even though Cyrus didn’t want to sing her Disney-era songs, she felt ambivalent about the injunction. “It was still sad knowing those songs have my voice, my face, and I wasn’t allowed to sing them,” she said.
As of last year, though, both worlds have opened back up to Cyrus. She was named a Disney Legend in a 2024 ceremony, where she apologized to the Mouse in Chief. “I definitely wasn’t created in a lab, and if I was, there must’ve been a bug in the system which caused me to malfunction somewhere between the years of 2013 and ’16,” she said at the time, according to Deadline. “Sorry, Mickey.”
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So now, the singer, who is now 32, told The Ringer, it could be back on for her Hannah Montana persona (if she wanted to go that way): “After being inducted as a Disney Legend, I was given permission to perform those songs in the future, which is pretty cool,” she said.
* The Disney ban must not have applied to the Hollywood albums, though, since “Party in the U.S.A.,” off Cyrus’ The Time of Our Lives EP in 2009, is the song Cyrus has performed live the most times in her life, as recent as 2022.
