FILE - In this May 29, 2010 file photo, American singer and actress Miley Cyrus performs during her concert at the Rock in Rio music festival in Lisbon. (AP Photo/Armando Franca, file) (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - In this May 29, 2010 file photo, American singer and actress Miley Cyrus performs during her concert at the Rock in Rio music festival in Lisbon. (AP Photo/Armando Franca, file) (Associated Press) 
 
 Miley Cyrus won't be told what she should wear or what she should sing about. The 17-year-old is releasing new album, "Can't Be Tamed," and is doing it her way, even though some say she is going to too far for her age. 
 
 "I'm not trying to be 'slutty,'" said Cyrus in a recent interview. "I'm not trying to be like, go to the club and get a bunch of guys ... What I'm trying to do is to make a point with my record and look consistent, in the way my record sounds and the way I dress." 
 
 What she wears has been put under the spotlight recently. Some thought the video for "Can't Be Tamed" was too provocative, and others have criticized her for revealing too much skin in her outfits. 
 
 Cyrus admits to being partial to shorts and hot pants. But she sees nothing wrong with flashing her legs. 
 
 "I'm really comfortable with my body, I work really hard to be fit and to know that I can wear whatever makes me most comfortable. I feel more comfortable dressing with a little less, which is just how I've always been," she said. 
 
 "Now I'm able to do that a little more freely and, also, I've just grown up to be this way too. It's not like this was me five years ago. It's me now, presently." 
 
 Maturing is Cyrus' current mission. 
 
 She'll finally shed the blonde wig of her Disney pop star persona, "Hannah Montana," when it ends this year. Then Cyrus will be free to embrace her solo stardom and sex appeal. 
 
 "When you're 11, the word you would use to describe someone is definitely not sexy, and as you get older I think you grow into that. And I think I've done that but that's not my schtick. That's not what I'm trying to do to sell records. I want people to buy my record because of my music." 
 
 "Can't Be Tamed" is out on Monday. 
 
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 Online: 
 
 http://www.mileycyrus.com/ ||||| Last summer, when "Wrecking Ball" earned her a VMA for Video of the Year, Cyrus sent 22-year-old Jesse Helt -- one of nearly 114,000 homeless men and women presently living in California -- onstage to palm the statue. A year had passed since she'd tugged on a flesh-colored latex bikini and intimated digital intercourse with a foam finger while Robin Thicke, bedecked in Beetlejuice stripes, stood smirking behind his aviators. The 2014 performance was less jubilant, if significantly more heartfelt. Helt, reading from a small piece of paper, recounted his plight. When the camera cut to Cyrus in the audience, wearing a black leather ensemble and perched, precariously, on some kind of partition, her eyes were glinting, hot. "I felt like I was witnessing a modern-day 'I Have a Dream,' and it had nothing to do with me," she says. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Happy Hippie is designed as a corrective to what Cyrus understands as immoral politicking, the sort that pits outliers as pariahs and favors an archaic status quo. The foundation treats at-risk kids with art and animal therapies, two proven balms that have been instrumental in Cyrus' own self-care. Although she was raised Christian, Cyrus maintains a particular contempt for fundamentalist lawmakers who rally against this sort of progressive, potentially life-saving change. "Those people [shouldn't] get to make our laws," she says. Those people -- the ones who believe that, say, Noah's Ark was a real seafaring vessel. "That's fucking insane," she says. "We've outgrown that fairy tale, like we've outgrown fucking Santa and the tooth fairy." 
 
 
 
 
 
 Eventually, she says, the problem of homelessness became impossible for her to ignore. "I can't drive by in my fucking Porsche and not fucking do something," she says. "I see it all day: people in their Bentleys and their Rolls and their Ubers, driving past these vets who have fought for our country, or these young women who have been raped." She pauses. "I was doing a show two nights ago, and I was wearing butterfly nipple pasties and butterfly wings. I'm standing there with my tits out, dressed like a butterfly. How the fuck is that fair? How am I so lucky?" 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Cyrus grew up outside of Nashville with her brothers and sisters on a 500-acre farm where, she says, she began a formative practice of getting up early in the morning and riding a dirt bike around in the nude. In the year of her birth, her father, Billy Ray, became briefly, colossally famous for wearing a mullet and performing a country song about getting dumped. Dolly Parton is her godmother. ("She taught me how to treat people well," Cyrus says.) In 2006, Cyrus was cast in the title role of the Disney Channel's hugely popular Hannah Montana, the gig that would handily propel her to mega-stardom. Cyrus grew up outside of Nashville with her brothers and sisters on a 500-acre farm where, she says, she began a formative practice of getting up early in the morning and riding a dirt bike around in the nude. In the year of her birth, her father, Billy Ray, became briefly, colossally famous for wearing a mullet and performing a country song about getting dumped. Dolly Parton is her godmother. ("She taught me how to treat people well," Cyrus says.) In 2006, Cyrus was cast in the title role of the Disney Channel's hugely popular, the gig that would handily propel her to mega-stardom. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Although her parents' marriage has been, at times, tempestuous -- each has filed for divorce and subsequently called off the proceedings -- Cyrus is wholly enamored with both. She calls her dad a "cool hippie psycho freak," which, in Cyrus' world, is praise of the highest order. Her mom, Tish, a producer and actress, is "super cosmic" and "a complete optimist, the fucking cheerleader of the universe." There is deep affection in Cyrus' voice, even when she refers to them again, later, as "conservative-ass motherfuckers." 
 
 
 
 
 
 She says she has come to consider her own sexuality -- even her own gender identification -- fluid. "I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn't involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that's legal, I'm down with. Yo, I'm down with any adult -- anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me," she says. "I don't relate to being boy or girl, and I don't have to have my partner relate to boy or girl." She says she's had romantic entanglements with women that were just as serious as the ones (Liam Hemsworth, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Nick Jonas) that ended up in Us Weekly. "I've had that," she admits. "But people never really looked at it, and I never brought it into the spotlight." 
 
 
 
 
 
 She recalls confessing to her mother, at age 14, that she had romantic feelings toward women. "I remember telling her I admire women in a different way. And she asked me what that meant. And I said, I love them. I love them like I love boys," she says. "And it was so hard for her to understand. She didn't want me to be judged and she didn't want me to go to hell. But she believes in me more than she believes in any god. I just asked for her to accept me. And she has." These days, Cyrus only wants to grant others the same clemency. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Since leaving the Disney cocoon for a pop career, Cyrus has accrued equal amounts of public adoration and derision. At times the naysayers have been loud, nearly gleeful. There is, for example, a four-minute YouTube montage titled "Miley Cyrus Worst Moments" that features her jokily simulating various sex acts on her buddies, smoking alone in a parked car and crying while singing. To which I say: who among us has not had that kind of day? Since leaving the Disney cocoon for a pop career, Cyrus has accrued equal amounts of public adoration and derision. At times the naysayers have been loud, nearly gleeful. There is, for example, a four-minute YouTube montage titled "Miley Cyrus Worst Moments" that features her jokily simulating various sex acts on her buddies, smoking alone in a parked car and crying while singing. To which I say: who among us has not had that kind of day? 
 
 
 
 
 
 There's also a sizable amount of twerking, the move for which Cyrus is infamous: hands on knees, back pitched into a perfect arc, buttocks outstretched, cheeks gyrating so wildly they appear to be operating independent of the rest of her body. It is strange, now, to think this was ever considered subversive. With Cyrus, there were initial rumblings of cultural misappropriation -- that she was not entitled to perform this dance, this way, with the partners she chose -- but then twerking got cute, trickled down, became one of those buzzwords local news anchors over-enunciate with forced bemusement while inwardly fantasizing about the first scotch of the evening. 
 
 
 
 
 
 What is less discussed is that Cyrus is a very good pop singer and occasionally a great one. She has a porous, burly voice that recalls Rumours-era Stevie Nicks -- the kind that's good for communicating particular strains of duress (specifically: what it feels like to love too hard). But what she has managed to do better than nearly anyone -- save, perhaps, Andrew W.K. -- is legitimize partying as an ideological choice. In Cyrus' hands, "La da dee da dee / We like to par-tee" becomes a resonant generational credo. That she has been persecuted for these things -- or at least openly mocked -- makes her commitment to love-yourself-no-matter-what activism even more poignant. 
 
 
 
 
 
 As for the next record, she's moving forward on her own terms, despite some nail-biting from her camp: "They're like, 'Don't make it too weird, don't make it avant-garde; you can't go from Miley to Björk!'" She's recording at all hours in a studio she recently built out of her garage in Los Angeles. "I don't have to have writers, I don't have to have fuckin' producers in there. Mike Will will text me a beat, and I'll go in my studio and work on it by myself." She says she's been listening to the Flaming Lips "almost exclusively." (Lips frontman Wayne Coyne, whom she calls "the most closest fucking human in my life," is a recent collaborator.) Also a little Gucci Mane. A little Waylon. 
 
 
 
 
 
 For Cyrus, it's less about renouncing her past than imagining a wild new future, one in which people are free to buck expectations and live whatever kind of life feels truest to them. She remains refreshingly cognizant, meanwhile, of everything that's left for her to learn. Which sounds unremarkable, maybe, but is anomalous among people for whom all the traditional signifiers of success (fame, adulation, profit) have been realized. It gives her a specific charm -- an uncommon openness. 
 
 
 
 
 
 I believe her when she says she's the least judgmental person ever. "As long as you're not hurting anyone," she says, "your choices are your choices."
– Attention: Miley Cyrus is “not trying to be slutty,” she insists. Sure, she likes to flash a lot of skin (as photos show, she’s recently taken to going pantsless), but that’s just because she feels “more comfortable dressing with a little less,” she tells the AP. “What I'm trying to do is to make a point with my record," which is called...wait for it...Can't Be Tamed, "and look consistent, in the way my record sounds and the way I dress.” And while she says she’s grown into her sex appeal (she is all of 17 now, remember!), “that’s not what I'm trying to do to sell records. I want people to buy my record because of my music.” Meanwhile, Perez Hilton—currently in hot water for posting an upskirt photo of Miley—insists she was wearing underwear in the picture and says he was simply pointing out “she was exiting this car in a very un-ladylike fashion.”