Noah Cyrus honored her late friend, rapper XXXTentacion, by featuring him on a track from her new album.
The pop and indie rock singer — and younger sister of Miley Cyrus — opened up about XXXTentacion during the Monday (November 17) episode of The Zach Sang Show. The two previously collaborated on the 2017 track “Again,” released just a year before the Florida rapper was fatally shot in his hometown at age 20.
Around the 7-minute mark of the video below, Cyrus shared that she always signs her letters with “XXX” as her personal way of saying goodbye — which is why she felt it was fitting to close her new album, I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me, with the song “XXX.”
“That wasn’t our ending to the album for the longest time,” Cyrus told Sang. “We actually had ‘Love is a Canyon.’ It was ‘XXX’ and then ‘Love is a Canyon.’ One day I texted Mike like, ‘Are we dumb?… I sign every letter with ‘XXX.’ That’s literally what we’re saying — we end every goodbye with ‘XXX.’”
Elsewhere in the conversation, Cyrus said she plans to keep performing “Again.”
“I always want Jah to be part of my set,” she said, referencing XXXTentacion’s birth name, Jahseh Onfroy. “No matter how the genre shifts, we’ll always find a way to keep that in the show.”
She went on to say that the rapper was the “reason” she decided to record “With You,” a song her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, wrote years ago but never released.
“Back in 2018, when I was really struggling with what happened to [XXXTentacion], my dad would sing me this song — it was the first song he ever wrote,” Cyrus shared. “Every time he sang, ‘Just listen in the wind, know that I’m your friend and always with you,’ I would always picture Jah.”
“And that’s why I wanted it on this album — to finally put it out there and feel that connection with him,” she said.
While XXXTentacion released two albums during his life, three more have arrived posthumously, including the soundtrack for the 2022 documentary Look At Me.
