Bad news for Morrissey fans: Morrissey is in the news again (it’s always bad when that happens). This time, rather than saying or doing something awful (oh hey, maybe this is good news), ol’ Moz simply announced on the official Morrissey website that Miley Cyrus has requested to be removed from a track called “I Am Veronica” for the still-unreleased album Bonfire Of Teenagers. Cyrus apparently recorded backing vocals for the song years ago, but the only indication we have for why this is happening now is that the website notes that it “comes at a time when Morrissey has disassociated himself with Capitol Records [Los Angeles], who control the hidden album Bonfire Of Teenagers”—the implication being that the two events are somehow related.
As far as we can tell, Cyrus is with Columbia, so it’s not like she has some special connection to Capitol, so maybe it’s just Morrissey (or a spokesperson?) wallowing in misery a bit. Cyrus has been posting on Instagram a lot with the tagline “New Year, New Miley,” but that’s most likely about her New Year’s Eve thing on NBC and not Morrissey. In our experience, most things are not about Morrissey.
Back to this “hidden album,” though, Bonfire Of Teenagers has had a difficult time getting released even before Cyrus wanted off of it (do you think she Googled “Morrissey” and saw what he’s been up to for the last… few decades?). In 2021, Morrissey said that the album—his “best,” according to him—didn’t have a label at all, but Variety says Capitol eventually came along and had originally planned to put it out in early 2023. Morrissey recently announced that he had “voluntarily withdrawn” from any association with the label, though, so it has been pulled from release.
So what we have here is a situation where people don’t want to work with Morrissey and Morrissey doesn’t want to work with people. Is it good or bad news? A little of both, so we’ll file it under “Could Be Worse News.”