Miley Cyrus has said she felt “villainised” after her split from Liam Hemsworth.
The singer and the Hunger Games actor divorced in January after Hemsworth filed the legal papers in August 2019, about eight months after their wedding.
They were together for nearly 10 years before they tied the knot in December 2018.
The day after Hemsworth filed for divorce, Cyrus denied on Twitter that her alleged infidelity was the reason.
“I can admit to a lot of things but I refuse to admit that my marriage ended because of cheating,” Cyrus said in one of a series of tweets.
“Liam and I have been together for a decade. I’ve said it before & it remains true, I love Liam and always will.”
Speaking to Zane Lowe in an Apple Music interview which will air later on Friday, she said: “I felt like my story and my narrative had kind of been told for me over the past year.
“Obviously I went through an extremely public break-up and, even more than that, a divorce, and with someone that I had been with for 10 years.
“I felt kind of villainised. I also felt like I kind of shut down, because it was kind of, respectfully, below me to engage with the press and the media at that time.
“It felt like I would rather be able to articulate this experience in a poetic way that also I can put back into my art. I never really have engaged. I’ve only played with the public and the perception in that way.”
Discussing her new single, she said: “So for this record, actually, the way that I even wrote Midnight Sky was I was prepping to create a video for another song.
“I wrote and directed and conceptualised the video for Midnight Sky, but it started because I was doing that with another song.
“Then Andrew Watt, my creative partner, came over and played me this track, and I scratched everything and said, ‘I’ve got to write this. This is the foundation on which I feel like I can lay my story on top of that.’
She added: “I’ve always spoken directly to my audience, and I felt like I kind of had lost that connection to my fans, that they were kind of in the dark, especially with the idea that there was supposed to be these three EPs, and I only dropped one.
“Again, talking about growing pains, I really had to deal with kind of the loss of my home in Malibu (in the California wildfires).
“I had to deal with the loss of a love in my life. I had to kind of be human and experience and grow, but then I wanted to tell it directly from my mouth and not from the idea of the public perception, because my story throughout my career has been told through the public perception a lot.
“I think I just want to regain that power. I think a lot of women are doing that now.”