Still Left to Cry
The BBC Radio 1 Live Lounge has hosted a lot of covers over the years, but Miley Cyrus sitting down with Mark Ronson to sing Ariana Grande’s No Tears Left to Cry hits differently when you know where the song came from.
May 22, 2017. The Manchester Arena. Twenty-two people killed as the crowd filed out after Ariana’s show, a bomb detonating while kids were still humming the songs they’d just heard. Ariana said she cried a hundred times writing the album that followed. She said she couldn’t talk about that night without falling apart, that she’d bonded with those fans in a way she hadn’t expected—because they shared a wound nobody else could fully understand. No Tears Left to Cry carries all of that: the exhaustion of sustained grief, the decision to keep going anyway, the strange upside-down calm that arrives on the other side of devastation.
The One Love Manchester benefit concert a few weeks after the attack became something genuinely moving rather than just logistically impressive. Ariana gathered her people—the Black Eyed Peas performing Where Is the Love with her, Coldplay working through the Oasis song Don’t Look Back in Anger beside her, Miley and Ariana sharing a microphone for Don’t Dream It’s Over. Katy Perry stood onstage and said, with complete sincerity, that love beats fear. Justin Bieber said it too. Normally that kind of statement from a pop star sounds managed, hollow, insufferable. That night it didn’t. The context was too raw for irony.
And then, more than a year later, Miley brings the song to the Live Lounge with Ronson—and the cover is pure feeling. She doesn’t do anything flashy with it. She just sings it like she means it, which is maybe the only thing worth doing with a song like that. Ariana wrote it about surviving something almost unsurvivable. Miley has her own versions of that story. You hear them in how she handles the melody, the places she holds back when you’d expect her to push.
Some songs earn their place in the world the hard way. This is one of them.