Level 1 - Absolute Beginner
Miley Cyrus is a singer from the United States. On Friday night she sings at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles. It is her first time on that stage.
She has a new album. The album is called Bass Persuades. It comes out in September.
Miley loves a singer named Dolly Parton. She calls her Aunt Dolly. Dolly dies in August. She is 80 years old.
Miley sings Dolly's famous song Jolene. She cries on the stage. She tells the crowd that she still feels Dolly with her.
- singer
- A person who sings songs, often as a job.
- stage
- The raised floor where singers and actors perform.
- album
- A group of songs sold together.
- song
- A short piece of music with words.
- crowd
- A large group of people in one place.
- cry
- To have tears come from your eyes.
- famous
- Known by very many people.
- aunt
- The sister of your mother or father.
Level 2 - Elementary
Miley Cyrus performed at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles on Friday night. It was the first time she had played the famous open-air venue, and the show opened a run of concerts for her tenth studio album, Bass Persuades, which was released in September.
The most emotional moment of the night was her tribute to Dolly Parton. Parton, the country music star, died in August at the age of 80. Cyrus has known her since childhood and has always called her Aunt Dolly.
Cyrus cried as she remembered that Parton had once invited her to come up on stage at the same venue. She did not take the invitation. She chose to stay in the audience and watch the concert as an ordinary fan instead.
She then sang Jolene, one of Parton's best known songs. Speaking to the audience, she said that she and Dolly are eternal and that nothing in this life could tear them apart. She added that she feels her now more than ever.
- perform
- To sing, act or play music in front of an audience.
- venue
- A place where concerts or events are held.
- open-air
- Outside, with no roof over it.
- tribute
- Something said or done to show respect for a person, often after they die.
- audience
- The people who watch or listen to a performance.
- fan
- Someone who likes a singer, team or performer very much.
- release
- To make a record, film or book available to the public.
- eternal
- Lasting for ever, without end.
Level 3 - Intermediate
Miley Cyrus took the Hollywood Bowl stage for the first time on Friday night, launching a run of shows in support of Bass Persuades, the tenth studio album of a career that began when she was a child. The setting mattered as much as the songs. The Bowl is a Los Angeles institution, and for a performer who grew up inside the city's entertainment machinery, arriving on that stage as the headliner carried a weight that a newer venue could not have supplied.
The evening's emotional centre was a tribute to Dolly Parton, who died in August at 80. Parton was a presence in Cyrus's life from childhood, and Cyrus has always referred to her as Aunt Dolly. Her grief has been public but guarded: in an Instagram post she wrote that the feeling of losing her Aunt Dolly was beyond what felt right to share.
On stage she was less guarded. Cyrus wept while recalling that Parton had once invited her up during a Hollywood Bowl concert of her own, and that she had declined, preferring to stay in the crowd and experience the show as a fan rather than as a peer. The anecdote landed as something more than nostalgia. It framed the night as the completion of a circle, the fan in the seats finally standing where she had once only watched.
Then came Jolene, the Parton song that Cyrus has performed throughout her career and that now carries a different charge. Addressing the audience, she said that she and Dolly are eternal, that nothing in this life could tear them apart, and that she would see her again. She told the crowd she feels her now more than ever.
- headliner
- The main performer at a concert or festival.
- institution
- Something long established and widely respected in a place.
- guarded
- Careful about how much one reveals.
- grief
- Great sadness, especially after someone dies.
- decline
- To politely refuse an offer or invitation.
- peer
- A person of the same rank, age or standing as another.
- anecdote
- A short personal story told to illustrate a point.
- nostalgia
- A fond, slightly sad longing for the past.
Level 4 - Advanced
There is a particular kind of concert that functions less as a product launch than as an act of public accounting, and Miley Cyrus's Hollywood Bowl debut on Friday belonged to it. Nominally the show inaugurated a run behind Bass Persuades, her tenth studio album, released in September. In practice the record receded and the evening organised itself around absence, specifically the absence of Dolly Parton, who died in August at 80 and who had been a fixture in Cyrus's life since childhood.
Cyrus has handled the loss with unusual restraint for a performer of her visibility. Her Instagram statement conceded only that the feeling of losing her Aunt Dolly was beyond what felt right to share, a formulation that withholds while acknowledging that there is something to withhold. The Bowl dissolved that reticence. She wept recounting an earlier Parton concert at the same venue, when Parton had beckoned her up and she had refused, electing to remain among the audience and receive the performance as a devotee rather than as a colleague.
That refusal is the hinge of the night, and Cyrus clearly understood it as such. A career that started in childhood tends to deprive its subject of ordinary spectatorship; choosing the seats over the stage was a reclaiming of something the industry had taken early. Returning as the headliner inverted the arrangement without cancelling it, and the Bowl, which has absorbed a century of Los Angeles self-mythologising, is precisely the room in which such a gesture reads legibly rather than sentimentally.
The performance of Jolene that followed was therefore not a cover but an inheritance. Cyrus has sung it for years, and the song has accumulated the sort of biographical freight that no arrangement can neutralise. Her remarks were plainer than the staging: that she and Dolly are eternal, that nothing in this life could tear them apart, that she will see her again, that she feels her now more than ever. Grief rendered as repertoire is a durable tradition in country music, and on Friday the tradition did what it exists to do.
- nominally
- In name or on the surface, but not really in substance.
- recede
- To move back or become less prominent.
- fixture
- A person or thing that is a permanent, familiar part of a situation.
- restraint
- Self-control, holding back from full expression.
- reticence
- A reluctance to speak freely about something.
- spectatorship
- The condition or experience of being a member of an audience.
- self-mythologising
- The act of building up a flattering legend about oneself or one's own place.
- freight
- A weight of meaning or emotion that something carries.
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