Miles to Go (14 page)

Meet, Greet, Sing, Sleep

I
n a way, the whole idea of going on the Best of Both Worlds tour felt comfortable. After going on tour with my dad and The Cheetah Girls, I knew what it was like to have a bus as your home base, to wait backstage for the music to come up, and to hear a stadium full of people chanting. Except this time they wouldn’t be chanting my dad’s name, or Hannah’s name for that matter—if I was lucky, they’d be chanting for me!

During my first tour, opening for The Cheetah Girls, I performed as Hannah the whole time. This time, not only did I have top billing, but I got to do half the show as myself. It may not seem all that different to the people in the audience—I mean, I use the same voice to sing the songs—but it feels
really
different to me.

Hannah has a different message. Hannah’s songs are about what it’s like to be a famous person when you’re an ordinary girl at heart. Her songs, like “Just Like You” or “Best of Both Worlds,” are fun to sing, but I am not as emotionally attached to them. I focus on the choreography and moving the way Hannah moves. In a way it’s easier for me than being myself, but it’s also hard for me to get into that character.
(And to wear that wig!)

Performing my own music is the coolest feeling in the world. My songs are about things that are meaningful to me. Missing a grandparent. Mistakes that I’ve made in relationships. Things that make me happy or disappoint me. I feel that as myself, I connect to my audience more.

And it was a
big
audience. Let me run through some numbers really fast. The Best of Both Worlds was my first headlining tour. It ran from the middle of October 2007 till the end of January 2008. I played 68 shows in 59 different cities.
(If I counted right.)
Each stadium seated between 10,000 and 20,000 people.

You know how they tell performers to “break a leg?” Well, about a week into the tour, in Salt Lake City, I almost did. There was a move during “I Got Nerve” where four big, strong male dancers were supposed to throw me in the air and then, of course, catch me. But that night they popped me too hard, which meant I went higher and came down faster and with more force than planned. The dancers weren’t ready for how hard I was coming. I went right through their arms and fell onto the stage. Of course, this was during the “Hannah Montana” part of the concert. The “Miley Cyrus” part of the concert didn’t have any moves like that. It wasn’t very me. The problem was, if Hannah Montana broke her leg, so did Miley Cyrus.

I was lucky. No broken leg—this time. I was up and dancing again in a split second, but not before I heard the audience gasp. Then a whisper went around the stadium as everyone turned to the person sitting next to her to say “She fell!” As I went on with the song, those words tugged at my mind.

Falling like that is my worst nightmare. It didn’t hurt, but it was embarrassing, and I hate that feeling more than anything. They re-choreographed the move to make it safer, but the next night I was terrified that they would drop me again. “Don’t make me do it! Do I have to do it?” I pleaded with the director to cut the pop from the routine. But there was energy in that move that we wanted to give the audience.

My mom reminded me about cheerleading. She was right—in cheerleading you fall all the time, you fall so often that you practice getting good at falling, and then you fall some more. You never quit. I thought about my cheerleading coach, Chastity, and how she would have said, “Don’t hit the ground.” But I still dreaded being dropped, every single night. I remembered a coffee mug I saw once that had a Ralph Waldo Emerson quote on it.
Do what you are afraid to do.
And so I did. I kept going. I just did it. Now, when I think back on it, I realize that each day of the tour I achieved something, because every day I overcame my fear. The fear of being embarrassed can hold me back from doing things I want to do. I’m holding on to that memory as proof that fear doesn’t have to win.

I performed almost every single night, which is draining, but the tour was also kind of easy just because it was the same routine every day.

10-ish: Wake up on the bus

12:30: Sound check

1:30: Hair and makeup

3:00–5:00: Meet and greets

5:30: Opening band starts

6:00: Concert starts

10:00: Back in bus

Every day revolved around the performance that night. The morning was spent doing sound check and getting ready, then I had “meet and greets” with friends of friends, people who won contests, whoever it was. I love my fans, but the meet and greets were different, mostly executives or other people who wanted something from me—like tickets to that night’s show, which I never had. It’s hard to be excited and friendly to strangers every single day. There was kissing up in all directions, and the whole thing felt like a show, a game with no rules, no winner, and no limits. Whatever time and energy I gave, someone always wanted more.

My parents were always there for me, of course. For the most part they don’t want to take any of this away from me. This is my work, and they want me to have independence in it. But I can get too drawn into it, into feeling I need to satisfy every request, take every media opportunity, meet every fan, sign every deal. I found out later from my mom that she had decided I wouldn’t do any press on the tour. Not a single newspaper interview, radio show, or TV appearance. I was a little angry—I mean, it’s my career, and I like to be in on those decisions. But my mom knows that it would be hard for me to say no.
(Seriously, thanks, Mom—you saved me.)
There’s no end to the requests and demands for my time. People will push until I can’t take it anymore. I’m young, and people forget that. Including me. There’s no way I can make everyone happy.

The days on tour were a whirlwind of obligations, and then I’d do my show, and then, late at night, (when I didn’t fall asleep before my head hit the pillow), thoughts would turn endlessly in my mind. My brother Trace was in Europe. I didn’t have time to visit him. Should I be visiting him? What about my sister? Should I be worried about her? Should I be thinking about the show? My fans? My family? Was I forgetting someone’s birthday? Where was my energy supposed to go? Was I a good person for spending my time this way? There were lots of people working on my tour. There were tons of people coming to each concert. I was the center of it, and I didn’t want to do it blindly, going through the motions because some producers or marketers thought it was a good idea, or because I was going to make money, or even because I like performing and wanted to introduce people to my music.

My dad says, “Not everyone was called to be a preacher. There are different ways of representing the light. If you can make people laugh and sing and dance and rejoice in this world of darkness, that’s a great thing.”
It’s important to ask yourself why you’re doing what you’re doing and what purpose it serves in the big picture. I ask myself that a lot.

On The Cheetah Girls tour I had performed for cancer patients. I’ll never forget how it felt to know that kids who couldn’t be happy on a daily basis were at my concert. I vowed to myself to make sure I always performed for the right people and the right reasons.

After I met Vanessa, one thing was clearer to me than ever before. I knew I wanted to actively help children who needed it. For the tour, I worked with Bob Cavallo and Hollywood Records, one of the companies Bob Cavallo oversees, to give one dollar of every concert ticket to City of Hope, a cancer care center. Making people laugh and sing and dance is an incredible feeling, but I also wanted to give something as big as hope to people like Vanessa. Whether the audience knew it or not, each one of them was (through me) giving a dollar to City of Hope. We were all united in an effort to help people suffering from cancer. When our family first moved to Los Angeles, our goal was to try to be light in a dark world. Now I was doing it. As I performed in concert after concert, I kept that in the back of my mind—the knowledge that what I did that night would go further than what everyone in the stadium saw or felt.

Despite all the positive things going on, being on the road can get lonely. We were never in one place for more than one night. My “home” was the tour bus. I slept on a built-in bed. Plenty of times I just wanted a break, to go home for real. But I was lucky to have my friends and family on tour with me. People were what got me through it. I tried to think of them as my home. Isn’t that a saying, too? Home is where the heart is?

I know I talk a lot about my dreams. How can I not, when my life has taken such a dramatic, surprising, exciting turn for the most amazing? The tour was one big gigantic, elaborate, exhilarating, exhausting dream come true.
(Except for that one hairy dance move.)
I should have known something had to go wrong. It’s inevitable—dreams fade or change eventually.