Into The Music
There is a version of the Miley Cyrus story where Hannah Montana is the prologue, a cute starting point before the real arc begins. That version is wrong. Twenty years after the show premiered on Disney Channel, Cyrus is making the case, with surprising grace, that the two halves of her career are not a before and after. They are a conversation.
She made that argument directly this week with “Younger You,” a new song released alongside clips from the Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special on Disney+, which aired March 24. The special brought Chappell Roan, Selena Gomez, and both of Cyrus’ parents into the room. It was filmed in front of a live audience, and it felt less like nostalgia and more like someone revisiting a chapter they had made peace with.
“Younger me has loved celebrating 20 years of Hannah Montana with you,” Cyrus wrote on Instagram. “This song is yours as a thank you for the life we’ve grown through together.”
Hannah Montana ran on Disney Channel from 2006 to 2011. The show starred a then-unknown Cyrus as Miley Stewart, a Los Angeles teenager secretly living a double life as the dazzling blonde pop star Hannah Montana. It was a ridiculous premise that turned out to be a perfect vehicle, and Cyrus carried it with a confidence that, in retrospect, predicted everything that came after. Three of the five soundtrack albums the show spawned topped the Billboard 200. The Miley Cyrus era that began with the franchise’s launch generated a level of cultural saturation that almost no child star has managed before or since.
What followed was a deliberate dismantling of all of it. The 2013 Bangerz campaign was one of the more aggressive rebranding efforts in recent pop history, Cyrus shearing the clean Disney image with choreography, costume choices, and collaborations designed to say, as loudly as possible, that she was done being anybody’s idea of safe. It worked, as an act of self-assertion, though it generated more heat than the music probably deserved.
The decade-plus since has been genuinely interesting. Cyrus turned out to have a voice and a range as an artist that exceeded what either the Hannah Montana era or the Bangerz era suggested. Younger Now in 2017 was an unexpected pivot toward country warmth. Plastic Hearts in 2020 was a confident, rock-leaning record that surprised critics and landed with real authority. “Flowers,” the 2023 single from Endless Summer Vacation, became one of the biggest songs of the year and earned her a Grammy for Record of the Year. Her most recent album, Something Beautiful, arrived in 2025 to strong reviews.
None of that required her to pretend Hannah Montana did not happen. And “Younger You” makes clear she has no interest in that pretense. The song, and the special around it, suggest an artist secure enough to look at her own origin story without flinching, without irony, and without trying to reclaim it as a joke or a brand extension.
She started as a Disney kid with a dual identity built into her premise. Twenty years later, she is navigating the actual complexity of that, in public, in real time. That is its own kind of remarkable.
