Saturday Night Live music: Miley Cyrus performs ‘Bad Mood,’ ‘I Would Die for You’

This weekend Miley Cyrus was the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, and given that she’s done this gig before we knew what we were going to get — at least in terms of talent. We feel like back during her “We Can’t Stop” days the provocation overflowed to the point everyone forgot that Miley’s a genuinely good singer. She’s also a lover of a wide array of genres.

We got a good sense of some of this tonight during her rock-centric performance of “Bad Mood”. This is a song off of her new album “Younger Now,” an album that does include brighter, cheerier songs that contain a little bit of pop and folk. Miley was joined here by a full band, including backing vocalists. Still, nobody drowned out her voice and she did a great job handling the vocals.

While we wouldn’t say that this was her best performance on SNL (our favorite remains her emotional rendition of “The Twinkle Song”) this certainly was her best rock-centric performance. She worked the crowd well and even though this isn’t the sort of music most people are familiar with Miley doing it never felt artificial or forced.

Our hope is that this performance was a nice reintroduction to Miley for some people who haven’t heard her music in a while — it has been a while since she got the sort of headlines that she once did save for The Voice.

Second Song

Early in the day Cyrus announced that she would perform “I Would Die for You” — a surprising choice mostly in that she’s not doing her most well-known songs on the show tonight. This song has far more of a country vibe than the first one, and allowed Miley to showcase a different side of her voice that stems from her roots. This is a haunting song — it doesn’t have the same edge and power as the first, so this is probably one that would benefit more from repeat listens.

Nonetheless, Miley did do a great job tonight with her two numbers showing off a wide range of what she can do — if nothing else, she probably got some more iTunes sales traffic from people who didn’t realize they liked her music.

What did you think of this performance? Share in the CarterMatt comments section below!

Want to check out our full review of tonight’s episode?

You can do that over at the link here! We do think there is a lot of good comedy in there courtesy of Larry David, and Miley even makes an appearance a couple of times.

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