Miley Cyrus has a plethora of classic hits and generation-defining songs, but her first hit was hardly that. As part of a TikTok interview series promoting her new single "Used To Be Young," the singer said her former record label didn't think her debut single "See You Again" would be a hit. History soon proved that the song was a hit.
The former "Hannah Montana" star explained that she wrote "Goodbye" as her first step in clearly distinguishing her musical persona from her iconic Disney Channel alter ego. "My own name is in the song, and I say 'my best friend Leslie' in the song, so that was really the beginning of my storytelling for the fans," she explained. "I wrote the song in a way that was very personal to Miley so there was no confusion between me and the character."
However, she claims her former record label didn't believe in the song, so it didn't get its own music video. "My record label at the time didn't think the song was a hit, so a music video was never made for it," she said. However, Cyrus naturally found success when she performed the song on platforms like Disney Channel Games. "[They] told me the song wouldn't be a hit, but my fans decided otherwise," she added. "It's always been us."
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"See You Again" was featured on Cyrus's 2007 debut album Meet Miley Cyrus , which was released by Hollywood Records and was included on the Hannah Montana Season 2 soundtrack , but featured her first self-written song. While "See You Again" wasn't an immediate hit, it eventually became a hit at Top 40 radio and hit the Billboard Hot 100 chart in 2008, giving her her first top 10 hit and proving her That teenage intuition was spot on.
Fifteen years after "See You Again," Cyrus still holds true to this philosophy. The Grammy nominee added the song to her festival set list in 2021, and when "See You Again" started playing during the interview, she immediately started dancing to it and giving a shout-out to her younger self “Work, work, work.” "Hannah is for the kids, Miley is for the grown-ups in heels," she joked.
