Miley Cyrus Once Revealed the Original Message She Wrote While Penning Her Chart-Topping Song ‘Flowers'

Is Miley Cyrus' No. 1 song Flowers a reference to her romance with her ex-husband Liam Hemsworth? A lady will never tell! However, the 30-year-old pop artist said in her cover interview with British Vogue that the song initially had a totally different meaning.

The chorus lyrics went like, "I can buy myself flowers / Write my name in the sand / Talk to myself for hours / Say things you don't understand / I can take myself dancing / And I can hold my own hand / Yeah, I can love me better than you can."

Aren't the lyrics incredibly empowering? However, this was not always the case. In fact, it used to be really depressing. “I wrote it in a really different way,” Cyrus said. “The chorus was originally: ‘I can buy myself flowers, write my name in the sand, but I can’t love me better than you can.’ It used to be more, like, the 1950s. The saddest song. Like: ‘Sure, I can be my own lover, but you’re so much better’,” she revealed in the interview, per Glamour.  

She ultimately concluded that she'd rather triumph than rot away. “The song is a little fake it till you make it,” she added. “Which I’m a big fan of.”

Throughout the discussion, Cyrus refuted the notion that her album Endless Summer Vacation is a journal meant to be read literally, or that her lyrics, music videos, and album release are loaded with hints about where they're coming from. “I never need to be a master at the craft of tricking an audience,” she said. “It will set itself on fire all by itself.” 

She may never confess it, but some of her followers' conclusions appeared a bit too obvious to be a coincidence. Was it an accident that Endless Summer Vacation was released on Hemsworth's birthday? Maybe not so much. Then there's "Built a home and watched it burn," which at the surface very clearly looks like it is an allusion to the former couple's Malibu home, which was destroyed by the Wolsey fire in 2018.

Other fan theories are a little more bizarre. It's impossible to show, for example, that her lyrical references to Bruno Mars' When I Was Your Man in Flowers were inspired by Hemsworth's supposed dedication of the song to her. Or the fact that in the accompanying music video, Cyrus wears Hemsworth's old tuxedo jacket. However, many fans believe, like British Vogue's Giles Hattersley writes, “She has no time for any of this.”

Cyrus and Hemsworth split in 2020, and she is averse to the concept of people interpreting Endless Summer Vacation, or any of her recent music, as being directly about that relationship, despite the multitude of Twitter theorists. “I wouldn’t erase my story or want it to be erased,” she says of that 10-year relationship coming to an end. “Having an interesting life makes for interesting storytelling,” she concluded.