Miley Cyrus’s co-writers spill on how Jamie Lee Curtis convinced her to record song for The Last Showgirl
The singer was reportedly so "deeply ensconced in her own album process" she almost didn't participate in the film's soundtrack
By Gary Grimes
Miley Cyrus’s poignant new ballad for the upcoming Gia Coppola film The Last Showgirl hasn’t even dropped on streaming yet and already the song has picked up nominations at both the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards for Best Original Song.
And now, in a new interview with IndieWire, the song’s co-writers Andrew Wyatt and Swedish pop star Lykke Li have revealed how the ‘Flowers’ singer very nearly wasn’t going to be involved in the film’s soundtrack.
Wyatt, a longtime collaborator of Cyrus‘s as well as a cowriter on other soundtrack smash hits such as Lady Gaga’s ‘Shallow’ and Dua Lipa’s ‘Dance The Night’, told the publication that Cyrus was “deeply ensconced in her own album process” at the time that he was working on the film’s music.
“I thought maybe we weren’t going to get an original song after all, because we were kind of really down to the wire,” he said. “The film locked on September 4, or something, and we wrote the song and finished the song in August.”
In fact, it was only with the helping hand of one of the film’s co-stars, Jamie Lee Curtis, that Cyrus ended up fully getting on board. Curtis seized the opportunity to coax the singer into recording a song for the movie when they were both inducted as a Disney Legend during the same ceremony at the Disney D23 Expo earlier this year, reportedly approaching the starlet and telling her she had to do a song for the film.
“She is the ultimate showgirl” – Lykke Li on Miley Cyrus
“The next day, Miley actually reached out to me and that’s when we got the ball really rolling,” Wyatt said. Although Wyatt and Li had a bulk of the song completed, the producer explained that Cyrus made sure to put her own personal stamp on the track. “She wrote some words and wrote some different melodies in certain spots, and then did it at her place with her engineer, and then sent me the vocal back, and then I went and wrote the string arrangement on top of it, to support the vocal and that’s what’s in the film.”
Lykke Li revealed she was thrilled to have Cyrus record the song, saying: “She is the ultimate showgirl.”