Miley Cyrus Flips Bruno Mars' "When I Was Your Man" on It's Head with "Flowers"

Lara Prakash
//
2/6/2023

Miley Cyrus knows how to grab people’s attention and has been doing so her entire career. Her most recent successful attempt? Releasing her new single, “Flowers,” which has lyrical connections to Bruno Mars’s “When I Was Your Man.”

The single is part of her upcoming album, Endless Summer Vacation, and pulls inspiration from Mars’s song, which is rumored to be dedicated to Cyrus by her ex-husband, Liam Hemsworth, at their wedding in 2018. The two songs share a lyrically similar chorus, but the differences lie in the fact that Cyrus is doing perfectly fine on her own compared to her marriage.

Here is the chorus to Cyrus’ “Flowers”:

I can buy myself flowers

Write my name in the sand

Talk to myself for hours

Say things you don’t understand

I can take myself dancing

I can hold my own hand

I can love me better than you can

Now, here is the chorus to Mars’ “When I Was Your Man”:

I should have bought you flowers

And held your hand

Should have gave you all my hours

When I had the chance

Take you to every party ‘cause all you wanted to do was dance

Now my baby’s dancing

But she’s dancing with another man 

Cyrus made an exciting decision to use lyrics from a popular song that had a tie to her marriage and flip it on its head. The lyrics are a complete 180 from Mars’ and highlight the shift she feels from when she was married to Hemsworth to being on her own. Not all of the lyrics in the chorus are directly related, but she begins with the flowers reference and ends with dancing by herself, showing her true independence and distance from who she used to be.

We may never know if Cyrus truly intended for this parallel between her song and Mars’, but the connection “When I Was Your Man” had to her marriage feels like the perfect place to take inspiration from when writing “Flowers.”

“Flowers” is out on all streaming platforms, and Endless Summer Vacation will be released on March 10.

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