Miley Cyrus / Endless Summer Vacation / 2023
Used To Be Young
wistful but unbothered, affectionate toward one's own past
Miley Cyrus addresses an unnamed critic who misses her wilder public persona, answering the charge of change not with denial but with a reframe: what looked like chaos was simply youth. The song moves from defensive self-justification toward something closer to gratitude, closing on the idea that even the regrettable nights were not wasted.
self-reinvention public scrutiny vs. private growth nostalgia without regret aging out of excess reclaiming narrative control
Who's speaking
First person, addressed to a second-person 'you' who represents public opinion, an ex, or the press collectively; the narrator is self-aware and largely reliable, though she filters her past through a forgiving lens that may soften harder memories
What happens
The song opens with the speaker rejecting an outdated image of herself, then catalogs the fallout of her earlier lifestyle (bars, broken hearts, tattoos, regrets) without dramatizing it. The chorus reframes 'crazy' and 'wild' as simply 'young,' turning an accusation into a developmental fact. By the bridge and final chorus, the tone shifts from justification to full ownership — the wasted nights are claimed as meaningful rather than erased.
How it's built
Conventional verse-chorus pop structure, but the chorus's repeated vocabulary swap (crazy/fun/wild restated as young) functions almost like a thesis statement repeated with slight variation each time, growing more assertive by the final repetition. The wordless 'oh-oh' bridge works as a release valve before the last chorus intensifies the claim with added lines about wasted nights being remembered rather than regretted.
Section by section
Opening verse
The song begins almost like a rebuttal in a conversation already underway, establishing that someone else has been making claims about who she is or was. The speaker's response is calm rather than combative, signaling the song's overall tone of settled confidence rather than conflict.r
Pre-chorus/second verse pairing
Images of nightlife and emotional fallout accumulate, but they're treated as closed chapters rather than open wounds, with a travel metaphor suggesting deliberate redirection rather than simple abandonment.r
Chorus
“I say I used to be young”
This line is the song's pivot point: instead of refuting the accusations of wildness, she accepts the behavior but relabels its cause, shifting the conversation from morality to time.
Second verse
“tattoos and regrets, words I never meant”
Here specific irreversible consequences are named, but immediately defused by the preceding instruction not to cry over things that can't be undone — grief is acknowledged and then set aside in the same breath.
Wordless bridge
The instrumental vocalizing section functions as a kind of exhale, letting the song sit in feeling rather than argument before the final, most assured chorus repetition.
Final chorus
“Those wasted nights are not wasted”
This is the song's clearest thesis statement, directly contradicting the implied judgment that reckless youth was empty or shameful, and instead framing memory itself as the redemption of those nights.
Craft
- anaphora
- The repeated 'I know I used to be' openings in the chorus create a litany-like insistence, as though the speaker is rehearsing her own defense until it becomes settled fact.
- reframing/redefinition
- The song's central device is taking words the addressee uses as judgment (crazy, wild) and re-territorializing them as neutral descriptors of youth rather than character flaws.
- concrete imagery as metonymy
- Specific objects like tattoos, open bars, and crowded rooms stand in for an entire era of impulsive living, letting small details carry the weight of a lifestyle without narrating it directly.
- paradox
- The closing claim that wasted nights were not wasted turns a self-deprecating cliché inside out, insisting that even excess had value because it is remembered.
Reading it
The most direct reading treats the song as a mature, non-apologetic response to tabloid narratives about Cyrus's earlier Bangerz-era public image, reclaiming 'wild' behavior as a normal, even necessary part of growing up rather than a scandal to disown. An alternative reading sees the 'you' as less about press or public and more about a former partner or even an internalized younger self, making the song as much about self-forgiveness as about external perception; the lyric's ambiguity about who exactly is speaking the accusations supports either reading.
Context
Released on Endless Summer Vacation (2023), the song arrives after Cyrus has spent roughly a decade publicly shifting personas, from Disney star to the deliberately provocative Bangerz era to a more controlled, polished pop-rock sound. Without confirmed interview statements to cite, it's reasonable but not certain that the song obliquely addresses that public arc; I'm inferring this from career context rather than any direct confirmation in the lyric itself.
Listen for
- How the chorus's phrasing shifts almost imperceptibly across repetitions, adding small intensifiers by the final pass
- The vocal tone across verses — whether it sounds defensive or amused when cataloguing past mistakes
- The function of the wordless bridge as an emotional release before the lyrically weightiest final chorus
- Any shift in vocal delivery on the closing claim about wasted nights, which carries the song's emotional thesis