As Miley Cyrus continues to stoke anticipation for her ninth album, Something Beautiful, “More to Lose,” the fourth song from it that she’s released with an accompanying video, lends additional sonic insight into what to expect. And, like “Something Beautiful” and “End of the World” (with “Prelude” being the “anomaly” of the four tracks that have been unveiled in their entirety thus far), “More to Lose” gives the sense that Cyrus is in a “big theme, big voice” state of mind. In contrast to the other songs, however, it’s a moodier ballad about, for all intents and purposes, a love that cannot be. Cannot endure. Yet, just because it can’t doesn’t mean that Cyrus doesn’t continue to harbor “I Will Always Love You” feelings toward the person in question.
Much the same way as William Miller (Patrick Fugit) will always love Penny Lane a.k.a. Lady Goodman (Kate Hudson) in Almost Famous. Indeed, listening to the lyrics of “More to Lose” often makes one believe that Cyrus probably watched the movie before writing such verses as, “Say I’m leavin’ but I’m only playin’ liar/‘Cause when you’re lookin’ like a movie star in a worn-out coat/Yeah, I throw away my mind/It happens all the time.” It is this verse in particular that can apply not only to Penny’s famed beat-up fur-trim coat aesthetic, but also to the dynamic between both William and Penny, and Penny and Russell Hammond (Billy Crudup), the lead guitarist and songwriter for Stillwater, a band that Penny has followed for a while now in her role as a “Band-Aid.”
It’s outside the venue for one of Black Sabbath’s shows, for which Stillwater is opening, that William ends up encountering Penny. Yet she only decides to take an interest in him when he tells another Band-Aid that he’s a journalist and that, “I’m not a…not a…you know…” Sensing the derogatory word he’s about to use next, Penny emerges from the shadows to nudge him to finish his sentence, asking, “You’re not a what?” As she gets closer, her face illuminated by the streetlamp, it’s plain to see that William had no idea what he was walking into. Not only when he started to say those words, but when he decided to come to this concert at all.
Even though he’s thrown by Penny’s beauty and generally “angelic” aura for a split second, he still finds the cojones to reply, “I’m not a…groupie.” Penny, having waited for this moment, corrects, “We are not groupies.” A fellow Band-Aid named Estrella Starr (Bijou Phillips) then chides William, “This is Penny Lane, man. Show some respect.” Penny then explains to William, “Groupies sleep with rock stars ‘cause they wanna be near someone famous. We’re here because of the music. We are Band-Aids.” Of course, as the viewer quickly learns, Penny is definitely there for more than just the music. She’s there, ultimately, to rekindle her romance with Russell, even though she vowed she wasn’t “doing that” anymore.
Alas, this time around, there’s another heart involved in what becomes, in its way, a bizarre love triangle. For the closer that William gets to Penny, the closer he gets to Russell (and vice versa). Constantly shown stealing longing looks at her, William becomes increasingly vexed by the way that Penny allows Russell to treat her. And he can’t understand why she keeps falling for it. The irony being that William is the Penny and she the Russell in their own dynamic. For, as the tragic rule goes, one person must always be more invested in a romance than another. Except that, in William’s case, the romantic feelings aren’t mutual, with Penny seeing him solely in a platonic light, and saying “unwittingly” hurtful things to him, like how she wishes that some of his niceness/sweetness could be transferred to Russell. This prompts William to let his claws out when she insists, “Maybe it is love, as much as it can be for somebody—” “Who sold you to Humble Pie for fifty bucks and a case of beer?”
As for both William and Penny, they could each easily deliver the following “More to Lose” lines with conviction: “I stay when the ecstasy is far away/And I pray that it’s comin’ round again.” The double meaning to the word “ecstasy” is also poignant on Cyrus’ part, for if she really is referring to her most major ex, Liam Hemsworth (as it has been rightfully speculated), it alludes to both the ramping up of her drug use while married to him and the fact that she gave in to the high of returning to him after breaking up (yet again). In 2020, she summed up this behavioral pattern on, of all shows, the Joe Rogan Experience, as the “thing I just needed not because we were in love anymore but because [of] the comfort and because my brain said, ‘Oh, this feels better. This is comforting.’” Cyrus then continued, “Knowing that I was giving in to an addiction made me feel way worse. I had the hangover. Next day, okay, we sleep together, next day, I’m totally hungover. It felt like a relapse every time I’d go back.” This definitely speaks to Penny’s dynamic with Russell, constantly getting sucked into his vortex of charm and talent. And finally realizing, after one too many times, that this situation not only isn’t “right” for her, but that it’s utterly toxic. Unfortunately, it takes getting her heart pummeled one more time to fully understand. That pummeling leading to a near fatal overdose after she tries to numb the pain with a bottle of quaaludes (oh, the seventies).
Were it not for William being there to rescue her, her demise would have been all but assured. And all because she couldn’t acknowledge the demise of her “thing” with Russell, wanting it to miraculously translate into the “real world,” as she keeps calling life outside of “the road.” Russell, too, has his moments of wishing that it could be different, that he could see Penny in a capacity beyond “the road,” but knows that life back home—including an ex-wife-turned-current-girlfriend named Leslie (Liz Stauber)—awaits. And that maybe what he really “loves” most about her is the way she makes him feel; you know, like a “golden god.”
Here, too, one of Cyrus’ comments on the Joe Rogan Experience rings true for the revelation that Russell and Penny eventually have about each other: “…me and someone that I loved realized that we don’t love each other the way that we used to anymore.” Even though Russell tries to call Penny up after all the dust settles so that he can attempt to apologize in person, Penny sneakily gives him William’s address to show up to instead. When Russell at last “gets” where he is, he surrenders to being ferried by Mrs. Miller (Frances McDormand) into William’s room. As the two stare back at one another with an air of mutual cautiousness, Russell says, “I think we both wanted to be with her. And she wanted us to be together.”
So, in the end, Penny has to be the one to pull the plug on her “going nowhere” relationship. And that’s something almost as painful as continuing to stay on the proverbial merry-go-round, with Cyrus putting it best when she remarked, “When it’s over, it’s over. What’s painful isn’t the relationship, it’s then when it’s done, you holding on for that extra however long you try to make it work, something that’s not working.” This, too, said in the abovementioned 2020 interview. Again indicating that the lyrics for “More to Lose” have been percolating, in one way or another, for quite some time. Maybe even since the first time Cyrus watched Almost Famous.
