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Two weeks ago, ahead of the release of her ninth studio album, Something Beautiful, Miley Cyrus, the 32-year-old star who is one of the most successful pop artists of all time, revealed in an interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that she suffers from a little-known condition called Reinke’s edema. Also known as corditis polyposis, the condition is a noncancerous condition of the larynx that can cause fluid to build up in the vocal cords when the voice is overused, causing swelling and thickening. Cyrus noted that she has had the problem for almost her entire life, and was careful to add that while most people develop the symptoms later in life, often due to smoking, in her case it was congenital. “My voice has always sounded like that. So it’s part of my unique anatomy.” She also confidently stated that she has no plans to fix the problem. She had minor surgery in 2019, but when doctors suggested another operation to remove a giant polyp from her vocal cords, she steadfastly refused. “I don’t want to have it removed,” she told Lowe, “given the risk of waking up after the surgery and not sounding like me.”
It makes sense that Cyrus wouldn’t want to risk damaging her instrument, which is now considered one of the greatest voices in pop. Her tone, which has deepened with age, is rich and loud (in a typical high school choir, she’d probably sit in the Alto 2 section), but it also has a strangely nasal edge, with a shimmering breathiness and a hint of a raunchy Tennessee drawl, a reminder of her status as the queen of Nashville, the daughter of country star Billy Ray Cyrus and goddaughter of Dolly Parton. She’s able to begin long notes with a gentle, lamb-like vibrato and end them with a growl, as if she’s swallowed sandpaper mid-melody. Of all Cyrus’s vocal talents, perhaps the most notable is her rare ability to add a rasp to any line without ever sacrificing volume. She can take her voice into areas that sound truly dicey, where it feels like she’s about to rip her vocal cords out — and yet, miraculously, she remains in control. Who wouldn’t want that? By contrast, Something Beautiful may be Cyrus’s first album to take full advantage of her unusual range of vocal colors.
Cyrus’s admission about her altered larynx was intended as an act of vulnerability. She felt she had to explain to her fans why she hadn’t toured for years. (She compared the exhaustion of singing live for extended periods to “running a marathon with ankle weights.”) But it also underscored the uncanny, almost mythical aura that has surrounded Cyrus’s popularity from the start—the sense that she was destined for stardom. Much of this feeling stems from her background—in 1992, the year she was born, her father topped the country charts with “Achy Breaky Heart,” and she has consequently never known a life outside the upper crust of the music business—but it was reinforced when, at age 12, she landed the lead role in the Disney series Hannah Montana, about a high-school girl living a double life as a pop singer performing peppy, up-tempo songs to packed houses. Cyrus's voice sounded different back then—like all teenage voices. She had a cheerful, glassy tone that fit in well with the overall Kidz Bop sound popular with Disney at the time.
What really set Cyrus apart from her peers was a fan base that already believed she was a pop star. Hannah Montana served as a near-perfect Trojan horse for introducing a new act into a world that had ever been conceived—Cyrus played the undercover megastar so convincingly that her TV persona and off-screen aspirations quickly began to merge. Fans, most of whom were too young to believe that their favorite fictional characters could simply jump off the screen, eagerly embraced Cyrus as the arena-filling entertainer she was already pretending to be. In 2007, at age 14, Cyrus released her first album, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus, a double album that split the credits between Cyrus and her TV avatar: She sang as Montana on one disc and as herself on the other, though the songs on both discs were essentially interchangeable. In the years that followed, Disney continued to market Cyrus as a novelty act, offering two for the price of one. To promote her first album, she embarked on a national tour called Best of Both Worlds, performing part of the show as her blonde alter ego. (In recent years, Cyrus has joked, wryly about that phase of her career, that she was essentially tasked with teenage performance art; on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, she described Hannah Montana as “the ultimate drag queen for kids.”)
Cyrus stayed on Hannah Montana until she was eighteen.
Sourse: newyorker.com
