Two great tastes that have already proven to taste great together are now together again: Miley Cyrus has released a new single, “Doctor (Work It Out),” which finds her once again collaborating with Pharrell Williams.
The twosome last worked together in 2014 on “Come Get It Bae,” a song from Pharrell’s 2014 album, G I R L. but both artists have been teasing this new collaboration for a bit now, with Pharrell playing a bit of the track during a Louis Vuitton show in late January and both he and Miley posting snippets on Instagram earlier this week.
“Doctor (Work It Out)” is Miley’s first release of 2024 and her first new single since “Used to Be Young,” which was issued in August 2023.
Miley Cyrus performing at The 66th Annual Grammy Awards.
After the aforementioned Louis Vuitton show, Rolling Stone identified the song as one which first found its way online in 2017 and became known to fans as “Doctor,” adding, “It is rumored to have been created over a decade ago during recording sessions for Cyrus’ fourth studio album, Bangerz, which was released in 2013. The lyrics to the opening verse match what fans have documented from the less polished leaked version, however, the version that played has been rewritten in certain areas and seemingly completely re-recorded.”
Despite the absence of "Doctor" from the final edition of Bangerz, the deluxe edition of the album featured a total of four tracks which were written and/or produced by Pharrell: “4x4,” “#GETITRIGHT,” “Rooting for My Baby,” and “Own My Own.”
When Pharrell first worked with Miley, it was during the window when she was just leaving Hollywood Records and was on the cusp of starting her career anew with RCA, which is to say that it was her first album after the conclusion of her long-running Disney Channel sitcom, Hannah Montana. As such, Pharrell was all about doing whatever he could to help her find herself as an artist.
“She’s allowing herself to just be who she wants to be and not feeling like she has to ration herself to a grid that is what everyone else deems as ‘the perfect American,’” Pharrell told CNN in 2012. “She doesn’t really want to be ‘the perfect American.’ She just wants to be the perfect version of herself. And she encourages other girls to do the same thing.”
“He was really the only one that I could kind of tell him what I really wanted, what I really wanted to make, who I really wanted to be, what I really wanted to do,” Miley recently told Zane Lowe in an interview for Apple Music 1. “I think Pharrell was perfect because it was almost like he could be a bumper for me, but he wasn’t going to be a bridle. He was kind of the only one — I knew that everyone around me would tell me no — and he was really the only one that I asked, ‘What did he think?’ And he was like, ‘Go for it today, tomorrow, as soon as you can. That sounds like exactly the perfect thing to do.'”
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