Miley Cyrus Sells Out the Hollywood Bowl Twice, Answers Her Critics and Ushers In the ‘Bass Persuades’ Era

A new era of Miley Cyrus has officially begun — and it arrived with tears, defiance and two sold-out nights at the Hollywood Bowl.

The singer closed out her pair of special Los Angeles concerts on Sunday, Oct. 18, officially ushering in the era of Bass Persuades, her 10th studio album, which was released on Sept. 18. The shows were billed as a celebration. In practice, they became something more revealing: a superstar renegotiating, in public and in real time, what it costs her to stand on a stage at all.

The Mononym Era

The first headline is the name. Cyrus is releasing this chapter of her career under a single word — Miley — dropping the surname entirely. It is a gesture with a very short guest list, and nobody made that point more proudly than her father. Billy Ray Cyrus, 65, marked his daughter’s new chapter on Instagram, sharing a throwback photo of himself with Miley and her younger brother Braison. In his post, he praised the decision to go by her first name alone, name-checking the company she now keeps: Dolly, Cher, Elvis, Prince. “It’s a natural progression for an iconic superstar legend,” he wrote. “And the legend continues!”

The family endorsement matters, because this era is explicitly about identity — who Cyrus is now versus the performer the world first met two decades ago. With Bass Persuades, she has described the title as a nod to the way music physically takes hold of people: you feel it, you sing it, sometimes you dance to it, and then you carry on. A full heart, heartache, and every part of life in between — that, she has said, is what the record is about.

The staging matched the ambition. Avant-garde rockers MODEL/ACTRIZ opened both nights as her special guests — an opening act chosen for edge, not comfort — and the setlist wove the new material through the hits that built her: “Flowers,” “Used to Be Young,” “Something Beautiful,” “Orbit.” By the time Sunday’s show ended, the Bass Persuades era had something most album launches never manage: a defining live moment, replayed everywhere, that had nothing to do with marketing.

“I Was Going to Run Away”

If Friday’s opening show introduced the era, Sunday’s finale exposed its emotional machinery. Midway through the night, before performing “Something Beautiful,” Cyrus stopped the show to address criticism that had circulated after Friday’s concert — in particular, a fan’s commentary that she characterized as clickbait, questioning where her heart is when she performs.

What followed was less a rebuttal than a reckoning. Cyrus said she prides herself on being soft and strong at the same time, and that her vulnerability is a feature, not a flaw — something she loves about herself. She flatly rejected any suggestion that she withholds her heart on stage. Then she went further than most stars ever do in public: she admitted that performing is hard for her now, that it does not come as naturally as it once did. Before the song “Orbit” that evening, she confessed, she had already decided she was not going to come on stage at all. She was going to run away.

The reason she didn’t, she told the hushed crowd, is them. She would never leave thousands of people sitting in their seats unfulfilled. People change, evolve and grow, she said — and what the audience was watching was not an experiment, but an experience she was fully present for, in that moment and nowhere else.

It was an extraordinary admission from an artist at the peak of her commercial powers, and it reframed everything around it: the tears, the tributes, even the jokes. When she reworked a line from “Flowers” during the show — “Sorry to cry but then remember I sold out the Hollywood Bowl twice” — the laugh it earned felt like pressure releasing from a balloon.

The reaction since has split predictably, and usefully, for Cyrus. Fans flooded social media with clips of the speech, praising a honesty about performance anxiety that pop stars almost never offer at her level; the few remaining critics were answered, in effect, by the box office. Two sellouts at one of America’s most famous venues, on the back of her first Billboard 200 chart-topper in over a decade, is not the profile of an artist whose heart is anywhere but in it.

A Weekend Built on Dolly

Running underneath the era launch was grief. Both nights were steeped in Cyrus’ godmother, Dolly Parton, who died on Aug. 25 at 80. On Friday, Cyrus performed “Jolene” in Parton’s honor and cried on stage. On Sunday, she performed it again, after telling the audience about the night the lights in her hallway flickered in answer to a silent request she had made beside a mannequin of Parton that the country legend once gave her for Christmas — a story she swears her fiancé, Maxx Morando, witnessed without knowing what she had asked.

Later, holding a framed photograph of Parton and crying again, she led the crowd through “Used to Be Young” and urged them to sing loud enough for her “Aunt Dolly” to hear. For the encore, she returned hand in hand with Morando, 27, and performed “Let's Get Married” — closing a weekend that managed to be a funeral, a manifesto and a victory lap all at once.

What Comes Next

Cyrus now steps into the Bass Persuades era with the rarest of pop-star assets: total candor about its cost. The album is her first to top the Billboard 200 in over a decade, and the Bowl shows proved the demand is only growing — two sellouts, a mononym, and a star telling her audience, plainly, that she almost didn’t walk out at all. Soft and strong, she called it. On the evidence of this weekend, both halves of that description are doing just fine.

Also read: Aunt Dolly, Godmother, Guardian Angel: Inside Miley Cyrus and Dolly Parton's Once-in-a-Lifetime Bond

Photo credits: Miley Cyrus on the Today show, New York, 2017 (Casey J. Hopkins, U.S. Navy / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)); Miley Cyrus performing at Primavera Sound, Barcelona, 2019 (Raph_PH / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)); Dolly Parton at the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville, 2005 (Tech. Sgt. Cherie A. Thurlby, U.S. Air Force / Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)).