This is a trick question.
I have no idea at all what this is.
Dude, you said these were easy.
What the hell, bro?
I was... It's been in the weed era.
What is... What is this?
First lyric.
This is the life.
Hold on tight.
And this is the dream.
It's all I need.
This is the life.
Hannah Montana.
This is the life.
Light work.
We're just warming up.
This is the life is my favorite Hannah Montana song.
So it resurfacing makes me very happy because it was the first song I ever cut as Hannah Montana.
So now 20 years later that it's still living its best life.
That makes me happy.
Bye.
Thank you.
Hold on.
Wait, hold on.
Oh yeah.
When you're famous, it can be kind of fun.
Best of both worlds by Hannah Montana.
There's parts of being famous that, to me, I kind of love it.
Being famous for me is very fun because it comes with things that I love, like getting to experiment with my looks and my sounds and music and getting to creatively express for a living which I love.
But also it's not without its challenges that you do give up a certain sense of your own privacy.
And so it's something that I've really reclaimed over the you know kind of adulthood phase that I'm in of kind of closing the doors to my personal life and protecting my kind of sacred personal time.
Early on the songs were being curated a lot by Disney.
But I, as I am now, would never do anything that didn't feel authentic or honest and honorable.
And because it wasn't me, it was the character I always had to check in.
Maybe it doesn't fit for Miley, but does it work for Hannah?
And so Best of Both Worlds.
Obviously, being thematically perfect for the show is what makes the song so great.
Thank you.
Dude, you said these were easy.
The stars are aligned when I'm with him and I'm so into him.
What the hell?
Okay, let me think of the Hannah.
Is it if we were a movie?
I'm making a decision between Jesse and Jake.
I don't freaking remember the song.
Stars are aligned when I'm with him and I'm so into him.
I have no idea.
He could be the one.
Guys, the stars are aligned when I'm with him and I'm so into him.
Poetry at its finest.
He could be the one.
Team Jesse is probably more my real choice.
I would kind of go for that more bad boy.
Rockstar energy.
But I think, because...
Jake just made sense for Hannah.
So I think I was more team Jake at that time.
Hannah is more Jake.
Miley's more Jesse.
I like the kind of poly life that we're putting together for Miley and Hannah.
That's nice.
Very, very modern.
I love it.
Okay, you're getting like deep cut.
We need to go back to the singles.
Hannah means everything to me.
Is this just me?
Hannah means everything to me.
It can't be a song.
It's a line.
Oh, is this the last episode?
I could imagine Miley Stewart being like, Hannah means everything to me.
But I don't know, a line?
Who would have said this?
Hannah means everything to me.
Not something I said.
In real life?
Is this a Miley Stewart thing?
So this is an episode.
Is it the movie?
Okay, so is this before the climb or after the climb, where I'm about to tell the town my secret, and all of us have decided that we believe that an entire town is gonna keep the secret.
Is it after, before, always find your way back home?
What the hell, bro?
I was, this has been in the weed era.
What is, what is this?
I feel like Hannah means everything to me is like, something that was said a lot of times.
This is a little.
It was before.
I wanted to go to New York but I had to go to Nashville because dad Robbie Ray had to teach me a lesson.
Hannah means everything to me.
This was something I really wanted to do.
It was actually originally kind of an idea my mom threw out there.
She's always the kind of man behind the curtain.
We were saying, what's the next step, not just for Miley, but how does the show evolve?
Because the show naturally did become something bigger than just a kid's TV show.
It became something that culturally, like all ages all around the world, but it felt like it had reached its ceiling of what we could actually do on a sitcom.
Because a sitcom you only have, you know, 20 something minutes to kind of tell that story and also you want most of the beats to be funny and physical comedy and loud and you you don't have a lot of time to have still stories like deep moments with my dad or with the best friend and for things to go quiet.
So i think for us it was important that this show would evolve to the film so we could actually have some of these more grounded moments that you just don't get to do in a sitcom.
Tai Chi, practicing snowboard champion.
I could fix the flat on your car.
Rockstar.
I know this because this is Alex Cooper who hosted the Hannah 20th special.
This is her favorite Hannah Montana song.
And I asked her, does she actually know the lyrics to it?
And she never knew that it says Tai Chi practicing snowboard champion.
It's like, but that's the chorus.
She's like, I never even really thought about it saying that.
She does have it tattooed on her arms.
I don't know if she forgot, but.
Originally, I was not cast for Hannah Montana.
They actually filmed the pilot without me, with other characters and other cast, because they were waiting, kind of, for me to grow up.
And when I started auditioning, I was 11 years old.
And by the time I actually was on set filming the first season, I was 13.
So it was about a two year process.
I remember at first in the audition i was being put on tape so i was interacting with, like my aunt or my sister, whoever was willing to read the other part with me.
I was just in our kitchen in nashville, you know.
I never expected to actually get into the room with the disney executives that will end up making that final decision, and then, as the auditioning process continued, eventually i ended up flying out to la and being in one of the most terrifying rooms you could be in.
But it wasn't scary to me because I was so young that I couldn't even really comprehend fully what I was doing.
I didn't know what an executive even meant.
I just kind of thought well, they're going to end up deciding if I get this or not, which I would have been happy with either outcome, because I was a little bit stressed out about leaving home, leaving my friends, my family, my school, my cheer team.
It was a scary process to know that I was giving so much up, big risk, hoping it would be a big reward.
But I was gonna be okay whether I got the role or not, because I was like well, I'll just go back and be with my friends and be a cheerleader, and that would be cool too.
Oh, felt like I couldn't breathe.
This is actually perfect.
You asked what's wrong with me.
My best friend Leslie said oh, she's just being Miley, which my best friend Leslie is.
This is duh.
See you again.
My best friend Leslie is my real best friend in Nashville, and she was on my cheer team.
And so one of the main reasons I didn't want to get cast as Hannah Montana was because I didn't want to leave my best friend.
I feel like she definitely uses this like if they're like.
Okay sorry ma'am, all reservations are taken.
We have no more spots at this restaurant.
She might be like, but I am the best friend, Leslie.
She probably uses it to her advantage more than she admits.
She deserves it though, because I'm not an easy best friend to have, especially when I was younger, because I was wild and being my friend was 24-7 on.
I was exactly the way that I am now.
I wanted kind of Boredom was the enemy.
It was like, how do we just stay doing no matter what that was?
I'm still like that.
I was always like that.
I don't love being bored and I'm not bored very often because I keep myself busy, but that means my best friend has to keep up.
Ooh, wait, strike a pose for the front cover of a magazine.
Everywhere I arrive, I get high five.
Hold on.
This is a trick question.
Strike a pose for the front cover of a magazine.
Everywhere I arrive, I get high fives.
I have no idea at all what this is.
It's a Hannah song.
I had a feeling.
Strike a pose for the front cover of a magazine.
Everywhere I arrive, I get high fives.
I literally, okay, you have to give me like another hint.
Is it season four?
It's gotta be season four, because I was so tuned out.
Does Hannah have short hair?
Because that's my least favorite era and I blocked it out.
Okay, can you tell me?
It's Ordinary Girl.
I never was going to get that.
But Dochi just posted Ordinary Girl on her Instagram, which I was very excited about.
But I would have not gotten this.
Is this a transition, like an interstitial?
Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is that like what that is?
This has to be.
How did I know this but not he could be the one?
Oh, yeah, this is definitely.
Is it just ooh, ooh, ooh?
All of them are the same.
Ooh, yeah, yeah, ooh.
This is like, yes.
Okay, this is a transition.
Those are wacky, those ones.
Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream in my cardigan.
This one, I like.
Party in the USA, Miley Cyrus song.
I hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream in my cardigan.
It was always pretty organic for me to decipher what a Hannah song is and what a Miley song is.
And still, my ear is very attuned to what would be organic for Hannah.
Because, even though Hannah is a fantasy, she still has her own sound, I think, her own thoughts because again, it's Miley Stewart, and what I love about the Hannah music is a lot of the time the songs are inspired by something that Miley Stewart, the character, actually went through, so they really are real stories.
So, even though the idea of Hannah is that it's a facade, it's this you know, kind of double life.
She's usually singing songs that aren't very far away.
You know a Miley song.
I think the real difference between the Miley music and the Hannah music is she's kind of less organic and kind of more of a manufactured sound, which I think is really fun to get to play with both, because I love hyper pop and I love when things feel produced and glossy and shiny and big and mainstream.
And then for me, sometimes as an artist, I get torn just between the kind of storytelling, and I want the story to come first.
And so sometimes the production can kind of eclipse what you're trying to say if it gets too over the top.
But with Hannah, that doesn't matter.
More is better, more glitter, more dancers, more confetti, the whole thing, the whole pop works.
Part of the USA is another credit to my mom who she found that song and I actually threw a fit about covering it.
I thought of it more of the cover as recording it because I didn't write it.
And I was so writing my own music and like creating what I thought was my own sound.
But she definitely could hear the potential of that song before even I could.
A gift is being able to interpret someone else's words or ideas and actually make them your own.
Okay, if you're five or 82, this is something you can do.
Hoedown throwdown, that's easy.
I do remember the hoedown throwdown because right now, doing the hannah 20th anniversary special, jamal sims is the choreographer who originally choreographed the hoedown throwdown, and so we randomly improvised the other day and did it for the first time in however many years, and we didn't really miss a beat.
I think we have right now maybe Like six to eight wigs.
And I, of course, have my favorites.
I like when they're longer, blonder.
I don't love at the end of the show, Hannah's wig just kept going shorter and shorter.
I think we were trying to kind of you know all great artists.
They kind of have a metamorphosis or they evolve in some way.
But I felt like Hannah wasn't broken.
It didn't need to be fixed.
I liked season one and two.
Right?
You can change your hair.
You can change your clothes.
You can change your mind.
That's just the way it goes.
You'll always find your way back home.
We were just talking about changing the hair.
I love to change hair, change clothes, change my mind.
I love to experiment.
So those lyrics even though they're Hannah lyrics, they actually really kind of relate to me and my thought too.
Taylor had pitched that song along with a lot of other writers and songs, and we were just kind of curating the thing that would most kind of bring the story of the film to life.
And so we wanted a really big song for the finale of that.
It needed to feel celebratory because, you know, obviously Miley had just told the biggest secret.
And so we needed something that felt like the kind of balloon like drops all the way down.
You get grounded, you get still, but it needs to go all the way back up.
And so I love that song.
Thank you.
So la-da-dee-da-dee, we like to party dancing with Molly slash Miley.
Depends how you read that.
We can't stop.
For me, it had never been something that was created in a boardroom or all of us had a kind of a master plan.
Actually, I think what I love about Bangers is that it was such a risk and it did have its reward, but it was something that I was just doing organically.
It was really finding myself truly, because I had been in the character for such a long, kind of long time.
That character becomes you.
You know, I almost didn't have a full divide from Miley Cyrus, Miley Stewart and Hannah.
So I took a year between wrapping the last season and making Bangers to like actually just go on a discovery journey and live and listen to music and find who I was.
And so that was completely off map.
We were off roading at that point.
We were just doing.
I was doing whatever felt authentic to me behind closed doors in public, which is a brave thing to do after my whole life had kind of been scripted.
It was, you know, not without its bumps and it was turbulent at times.
Just because change is never easy, to kind of make these big, brave new choices.
But I always think the bigger the risk, the bigger the reward.
Everybody makes mistakes.
Everybody has those days.
That's one of my favorite Hannah songs, Nobody's Perfect.
That was also one of the first songs I ever cut as Hannah, and I love that one.
Everybody makes mistakes.
Everybody has those days.
Oh, there's a voice inside my head saying you'll never reach it.
The climb.
The song in the Hannah movie that changes everything.
There's a voice inside my head saying you'll never reach it.
I couldn't imagine there being any other destiny for me.
It felt like a perfect fit of fate, exactly what I was made to do and built for.
The character and I, I couldn't imagine anyone else ever being Hannah.
I would feel very territorial over that.
That's me.
That's an extension of myself and like anybody else that has a fantasy.
We all have our own Hannah.
Hannah is what you brave and what you do, in a way that sometimes i always say she's like she's the youngest drag queen.
She's like what do i want to do?
But i need this other character to almost be armor.
But i want the armor to be beautiful.
What is that?
And so that beauty could be whatever you want it to be.
That could be what you do with your hair, your makeup, your wardrobe.
But it can be deeper than that.
It can be something that you kind of subconsciously switch, that makes you feel like you're your ultimate self, but you don't leave your kind of everyday person behind.
