“I am not the person I was yesterday,” Miley Cyrus says to Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in an interview at her home studio in Los Angeles. “Cutting with Stevie Nicks on the phone, that changed me forever. Everything changes me forever. Every night before I go to sleep, I say goodbye to myself, in a way, because that person is done.” To celebrate the release of her seventh studio album Plastic Hearts, the shape-shifting global pop icon opened up to Zane about the many forces that have shaped her life and recent music: addiction, karma, family, peace, fear, divorce and Joan Jett. She felt particularly inspired by the latter while writing her ’80s-inspired LP, which features Jett and Billy Idol and finds Miley channelling her inner Debbie Harry. “When she created Blondie, that was like creating a drag character,” she says, explaining the power of an alter ego to transform and inspire creativity. “When you’re writing a song, you can go anywhere in your imagination.”