by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I have a serious creative itch to buy a guitar and try to start writing pop-rock songs. But for the moment, I’m going to hold off that. If I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it right. I have a novel I’m working on and that’s totally consumed my creative life for the foreseeable future.
But I still have music on the brain and, as such, I continue to think about Miley Cyrus’ career. I admire her willingness to take chances and I find it frustrating that, to date, all of those risks have fallen with something of a thud. I will give her credit, though, unlike Taylor Swift, at least Ms. Cyrus challenges her fan base. Ms. Swift, while producing good music, releases album after album that is nothing but fan service. Ugh.
Anyway, in a sense, it seems to me that Ms. Cyrus’ conundrum is she wants to bank into hard pop-rock and that market just doesn’t exist. It’s a dead end. I would go so far as to say only as part of a girl supergroup could Ms. Cyrus (with the help of some very famous friends) do anything about the pop-rock space right now.
So, I guess what I’m saying is Ms. Cyrus has two choices in front of her — one, she goes back to the tried-and-true safe adult contemporary route or she can continue to take risks and maybe, just maybe strike it rich by appealing to GenZ people who don’t even know who The Clash are.
Ms. Cyrus definitely seems to want to single handedly bring back punk and New Wave. But here voice isn’t really suited for that. She has a beautiful — but very pop – voice. As such, I would suggest she continue her current trend towards pop rock.
But I would also suggest she look to form some sort of super girl group for one album. It would help all their careers in the long run if she managed to pull it off.
