Earlier this year, Miley Cyrus opened up about the pain and loss she experienced when wildfires tore through parts of Los Angeles. The devastation struck a personal chord for her, as she lost her Malibu home during the Woolsey Fire in 2018. That moment of destruction prompted her to abandon the EP trilogy she had started with She Is Coming, after losing notes and hard drives in the blaze. She took it as a sign that those songs weren’t meant to be hers. Now, she has discovered a song that is — an original recording for Avatar: Fire and Ash.
“Having been personally affected by fire and being rebuilt from the ashes, this project holds profound meaning for me,” Cyrus shared on Instagram, alongside a short preview of the track, which does not yet have an official release date. Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third film in the franchise, is scheduled to open in theaters on December 19.
“Even through the flames/Even through the ashes in the sky,” she sings on the song, her voice floating over a delicate piano arrangement. “Baby, when we dream/We dream as one.” Cyrus co-wrote the song with longtime collaborators Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt. She previously worked with Ronson on the hit single “Nothing Breaks Like a Heart” and teamed up with Wyatt on She Is Coming after their first collaboration in 2018.
Cyrus was recently nominated for Best Original Song at the 2025 Golden Globes for “Beautiful That Way,” a track she created with Wyatt and Lykke Li for Gia Coppola’s The Last Showgirl.
“Thank you, Jim, for the opportunity to turn that experience into musical medicine,” Cyrus said in a statement. “The film’s themes of unity, healing, and love resonate deeply within my soul, and to be even a small star in the universe the Avatar family has created is truly a dream come true.”
In a conversation with Rolling Stone earlier this year, Avatar creator James Cameron reflected on his motivation behind the films. “I’ve justified making Avatar movies to myself for the last 20 years, not based on how much money we made, but on the basis that hopefully it can do some good, it can help connect us, it can help connect us to our lost aspect of ourself that connects with nature and respects nature and all those things,” he explained. “So do I think that movies are the answer to our human problems? No, I think they’re limited because people sometimes just want entertainment, and they don’t want to be challenged in that way. I think Avatar is a Trojan horse strategy that gets you into a piece of entertainment, but then works on your brain and your heart a little bit in a way.”
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