Miley Cyrus is pretty firmly in the midst of a comeback arc right now, having drawn strong reviews over the last month and change with releases from her upcoming visual albumSomething Beautiful. But what, we maverick counterfactualists of The A.V. Club ask, if Something Beautiful hadn’t ended up being an album? What if it had, instead, been a frankly deranged plan to hold a series of concerts in the planet’s most beautiful and isolated locations, in the interest of creating the least convenient set of tour dates ever held by any musician, ever? All that is exactly what could have happened, if not for the intervention of Mr. Harrison Ford.
The previous odd, but genuinely true, sentence comes courtesy of Cyrus’ recent interview with Apple Music’s Zane Lowe, in which she talked about the complexities of touring as a major musical artist in the 2020s. A lot of this is logistical, both for the artist’s personal health, and the massive undertaking that comes with moving a huge crew of people around the planet over the course of god knows how many months. But Cyrus also revealed that, at some point, she was kicking around an idea she called Somewhere Beautiful, which would have seen her play exclusively in forests, cathedrals, and other “intimate places that are full of beauty… that you can’t find in a stadium.” She held tight to this idealistic dream of touring music right up until she was receiving a Disney Legends award last year for long-time contributions to the company, at which point the concept was fed into the hope-destroying thresher we know as Harrison Ford.
Cyrus was apparently hanging out with fellow award recipients Jamie Lee Curtis and Ford (who were both, Cyrus affectionately notes, “On my ass about different things.”) She showed her plan for Somewhere Beautiful to Ford, who she’s known for many years. “You really want to go and set up in a forest?” Cyrus recalls Ford responding, slipping into his gruff registers. “And do what? Looks expensive.” Which was, apparently, enough to kill the whole idea: “I went, ‘Guys, we’re not performing in the forest anymore. Harrison Ford made a lot of sense.'”
Cyrus says Something Beautiful is, instead, her effort to capture parts of that experience in a way that will not make Han Solo roll his eyes. “The film is my way of touring,” Cyrus says in the interview. Something Beautiful the album is set for its release on May 30; the accompanying film will debut at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 6.
