Pharrell encouraged Miley Cyrus to 'go for it' and shed Hannah Montana image from Disney
Pharrell Williams helped Miley Cyrus shed her Hannah Montana persona on her climb to music stardom.
The "Doctor (Work It Out)" collaborators appeared on The Zane Lowe Show to promote the new single, which was 10 years in the making.
The duo first wrote "Doctor" a decade ago, and according to Cyrus – a newly-minted Grammy winner for her single "Flowers" – Pharrell helped her transition from Disney Channel darling to Grammy-winning global superstar.
"He was kind of the only one — I knew that everyone around me would tell me no — and he was really the only one that I asked, ‘What did he think?'" Cyrus told Lowe, according to Billboard. "And he was like, 'Go for it today, tomorrow, as soon as you can. That sounds like exactly the perfect thing to do.'"
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Pharrell added that Cyrus was "in a place where no one really understood what she was, and I got it.”
"I’ll never forget just meeting her at a time where people had pegged her to be one thing particularly," the "Happy" hitmaker said. "She was Hannah Montana at the time, and she was growing up and really wanting to experience life no matter how far the precipice was, that was her."
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Cyrus, who courted controversy and garnered Grammy nominations for 2013's "Bangerz," left Hannah Montana behind two years earlier, in 2011.
"He was really the only one that I could kind of tell him what I really wanted, what I really wanted to make, who I really wanted to be, what I really wanted to do," Cyrus said. "I think Pharrell was perfect because it was almost like he could be a bumper for me, but he wasn’t going to be a bridle."
Her music wasn't the only change that Pharrell encouraged Cyrus to make, she admitted to Lowe. It turns out that he's responsible for her infamous blonde pixie "Bangerz" haircut, too.
“I was like, 'Pharrell, I really want to change. I really want to have a big change,'” Cyrus said during the interview.
Pharrell and Cyrus are longtime friends and the latter previously contributed guest vocals to Pharrell's hit ''Come Get It Bae" off his 2014 album "Girl."