Kid Harpoon has described Miley Cyrus as a pop star who “pushes the envelope” ahead of the BRIT Awards.
Cyrus is nominated in the International Artist and International Song categories for Saturday’s show, in recognition a blockbuster 2023 fuelled by the success of her single Flowers and parent album Endless Summer Vacation.
Flowers took the No.1 spot in this year’s IFPI Global Single Chart, her first appearance in an IFPI Global Chart Top 10. The double Grammy-winning song, released last January, hit No.1 simultaneously in 29 markets around the world and finished the year at the top of the 2023 charts in markets including the UK, France and Australia.
With 1,767,494 UK sales according to the Official Charts Company, Flowers joins the likes of As It Was (2,610,111) and Watermelon Sugar (2,484,054) by Harry Styles among Kid Harpoon’s most successful hits.
“There’s a lot of similarities with Harry and Miley in that they’re both people you’d call pop stars, but when you meet them they’re very creative, pushing the envelope type people,” said the songwriter and producer, in an interview for our Hitmakers feature. “Creating environments where those people can still be pop stars but completely flex their creative muscles is a lane I really like.”
Kid Harpoon
Kid Harpoon wrote and produced on Endless Summer Vacation (96,473 sales) alongside longtime partner Tyler Johnson, while the cast list also included Michael Pollack, Greg Kurstin, Tobias Jesso Jr, Sarah Aarons and more.
“It is hard to process the success and what that means to you, because in the studio it's so abstract,” said Harpoon. “I've done so many [songs] that haven't [become hits], Flowers just connected in the right way. Miley sits in the bracket of people where there’s a lot of goodwill towards her. People want her to win because she represents a part of people that has a love for life. She just has that thing, whenever she does something she does it 100%, but she's also real, she's a country girl, she's very family-driven.”
Miley has been such a cultural icon at various points in her career
Kid Harpoon
Harpoon expanded on the role Flowers played in kickstarting a new chapter in Cyrus’ career.
“Miley has been such a cultural icon at various points in her career, so it's not really about a comeback, it's about taking where she's at and just re-upping it,” he said. “[Only] adding life into it, having her feel confident and doing her best work would yield that result, as opposed to thinking, ‘What can we do?’ Because I think when people try and make themselves relevant again consciously, it tends to not work, because they're referencing stuff that's quite current. Whereas with someone like Miley. who has it inherently in her to be culturally significant, if she just leans into herself, it's always going to work out for the best somehow.”
Kid Harpoon, who was named Producer Of The Year at last year’s BRITs, also told Music Week about his bond with Cyrus in the studio, where fashion and style often dominated the conversation.
“The best thing about it is that we have quite good banter in the studio,” he said. “She'll pull you up if you're not [looking stylish], but I would lean into that and say, ‘Jeans and a t-shirt, I'm good.’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah, cool. I get it.’ Although I did go to a wedding recently, and I asked her advice, and she told me what to wear. It was a suit that was thousands of dollars, so I was like, ‘I'm not wearing that to this wedding,’ and she definitely pulled me up on my style at the wedding. She was like, ‘You should have listened to me, you would have looked fantastic.’ It’s like, ‘Yeah, I would have been broke too.’ But yeah, she has high standards, she's amazing.”
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