This Miley Cyrus Song Feels Like The Beatles’ ‘Help!’

Miley Cyrus isn’t a rock singer, but she’s drawn a lot of influence from classic rock stars over the years. For example, one of her hits has some lyrical similarities to The Beatles’ “Help!” While many of The Beatles’ early songs were total fiction, John Lennon revealed that “Help!” was about his own life. The “Imagine” singer said that “Help!” was widely misinterpreted.

Miley Cyrus and The Beatles both showed a unique understanding of time

Love her or hate her, Cyrus’ career has had a lot of different textures. She’s released party songs (“We Can’t Stop”), soft-rock songs (“Mailbu”), disco tracks (“Flowers”), and an entire album of psychedelic experiments called Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz. One of her more famous ballads is her hit “Younger Now” from her country-inspired record of the same title.

“Younger Now” includes the line “I feel so much younger now.” That’s pretty similar to the line “When I was younger, so much younger than today / I never needed anybody’s help in any way.” Both songs play with time. Cyrus says she somehow got younger while John seems to imply his youth is completely behind him even though he was a young man when he wrote the song. Considering Cyrus covered “Help!,” it’s not out of the question that the Fab Four inspired her track.

Why John Lennon wrote The Beatles’ ‘Help!’

The book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono features an interview from 1980. In it, John discussed how his emotional state inspired “Help!” “When Help! came out, I was actually crying out for help,” he said. “Most people think it’s just a fast rock ‘n’ roll song. I didn’t realize it at the time; I just wrote the song because I was commissioned to write it for the movie. But later, I knew I really was crying out for help. 

“So it was my fat Elvis period,” he said. “You see the movie: He — I — is very fat, very insecure, and he’s completely lost himself. And I am singing about when I was so much younger and all the rest, looking back at how easy it was.”

The “Power to the People” singer contrasted himself with the man he was when he penned “Help!” “Now I may be very positive — yes, yes — but I also go through deep depressions where I would like to jump out the window, you know,” he said. “It becomes easier to deal with as I get older; I don’t know whether you learn control or, when you grow up, you calm down a little.”

John Lennon felt ‘Help!’ was overexposed

While “Help!” came from a real place, John still had some issues with it. He noted that the radio focused too much on a select handful of Beatles songs even though the band produced many classics. In his opinion, the overexposed Beatles songs included “Help!,” “Yesterday,” “Something,” “Let It Be,” and “A Hard Day’s Night.” He was pleasantly surprised when he heard “Glass Onion,” a deep cut from The White Album, on the radio once.

Cyrus knows how to cover The Beatles right and she might be finding inspiration in their music.