In record fashion, Cody Simpson and Miley Cyrushave become the hottest thing since freshly toasted sliced bread.
But its not as if the Australian pop star just slid into the recently separated She Is Coming artist’s DMs one night and they were off to the races. Though romantically they had been ships in the Disney-adjacent night—always in a relationship with someone else, often on different continents, etc.—their families have known each other for years and they were certainly aware of each other’s presence in the universe.
Miley has “always been a fan of his, but the timing now is different and feels right,” a source tells E! News. “She’s happy to have him around, and it’s good for now.”
And it’s fairly obvious how Cody feels.
“Miley Cyrus has always been my childhood celebrity crush,” Simpson said on Fuse in 2012, just a few months before a pre-Bangerz Cyrus got engaged for the first time to longtime love Liam Hemsworth. “I knew all the words to her songs, I’m not gonna lie. I’m not ashamed about it at all.
“I was a big Miley Cyrus fan and I think she will be forever the most date-able Disney star.”
The singer also referred to himself as “the male Taylor Swift,” because he too poured his emotions into his music.
“I write about everything that happens in my life,” Simpson said, “whether or not the songs are actually released or not. I just… music is just where I sort of write my emotions down, just like, I’m putting them out there.”
Well, pretty much none of the above has changed, except for Cyrus having moved far past Disney stardom.
Simpson already has a whole song he wrote for Miley in the works, which he’s planning to drop Friday. While she was briefly hospitalized to be treated for tonsillitis earlier this month (“BF coming to visit me @ the hospy,” she put on Instagram Story), he played it for her and they subsequently shared a clip of that intimate moment online.
“suddenly I am feeling much better,” she wrote, adding butterfly emojis, as he strummed some bars of the song, called “Golden Thing.” “this sweeeeeet guy came to visit at the hospital and sang the sweeeeeetest song he wrote just for me.”
“Cody is focused on his music and living a healthy lifestyle and she really likes that,” the source also tells E! News. “It feels good to Miley to be surrounded by his positive energy. They play music together and hang out in the studio. He wrote a song about her and she loves it. They have gotten a lot of attention teasing it to the fans and they are having fun with it.”
At long last, the collaboration—at least emotionally, if not physically in the studio—has occurred.
All the way back in 2014 Simpson was hoping to work with Cyrus. When asked when he, Miley and Justin Bieber, who he had toured with, might do a song together, Simpson told Entertainment Tonight, “Hopefully I’ll be able to do something with Miley…She loves a bit of country.”
Simpson also acknowledged the rough time both Cyrus and Bieber were having lately with scandalous headlines and online critics, noting that it was hard to see his friends go through that.
“Miley’s becoming a great mate,” he added. “She’s definitely, like, at heart a very sweet, normal girl from Nashville,” and it was just weird to him that people said nasty things about her. “She’s just the coolest chick. And my girlfriend [Gigi Hadid] is really close with people like Kendall JennerI’ve known her since I was like 14—people like that, that they give kind of a bad rap, I’m not sure why. I’m trying to figure it out. I definitely feel for someone like Justin because he is a good bloke, yeah.”
Cody and Gigi had only recently got back together themselves at the time, with Simpson explaining that it had looked as if it wasn’t going to work out, “but I kind of realized that I didn’t want to be without her.”
Moral of the story is, a lot of life experience has gone into the making of his new romance with Miley Cyrus.
In 2015, their little sisters, Noah Cyrus and Alli Simpson, appeared together along with Vanessa Hudgens‘ younger sibling Stella Hudgens and Instagram celebs Jack Johnson, Jack Gilinsky and Sammy Wilkinson in an ad campaign for Mudd—and Noah and Alli became fast friends, not least because the aspiring artists had successful older siblings in the music world.
“We always related on that front, and Miley and Cody are good friends, as well, so it was sort of a small world connection for us, which was awesome,” Alli told Billboard in 2017 at the iHeart Radio Music Festival, where she watched Noah perform.
“It is really cool” to see Noah’s singing career take off, Alli said, “’cause when we did our clothing campaign together, maybe two years ago, we sort of stayed friends ever since and I remember her, like, talking about music and she was always quite shy getting into it. So as soon as she released that first song, I was like,” she held her hand to her heart, “‘I’m so proud of you right now.’ So it made me so happy and congrats to her, she’s killing it right now.”
In it’s-an-even-smaller-world-after-all news, Cody was linked to Stella Hudgens all the way back in 2011, though that mainly coincided with Vanessa having taken her little sis and Stella’s bestie Sammi Hanratty to Simpson’s concert at the House of Blues in L.A. They were both 14.
But the list of the still only 22-year-old Simpson’s past rumored paramours also includes Kylie Jenner and Bella Thorne.
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“The whole ‘K-O-D-Y’ thing didn’t really work for me,” Simpson quipped to Ross Mathews in 2011 after he and Kylie’s brief teen romance ended, a crack at the surplus of names that start with “K” in her family.
At a meet-and-greet, also in 2011, Thorne had a laugh over a magazine cover that claimed she and Cody had started out flirting over Twitter—which, in fact, was fairly accurate. She confirmed that they had traded numbers “and that’s how I got to know Cody.” They had seen each other beforehand, grabbing lunch, and, she recalled, “I looked all grungy, with no makeup on…and just, like, hair up in a ponytail, flats.” But he waved to her and her friend, then they started tweeting, he got her number and invited her to his birthday party.
Simpson and Gigi, who he remained friends with, broke up for good in May 2015, and there have been several other rumored romances since. But at this point, it feels as if all roads have led to Miley.
At the Tiffany & Co. Men’s launch last week in L.A., the demonstratively affectionate Simpson told reporters, “I’m very happy. We are very, very happy…She’s creative. She’s very passionate about what she does, and I’m very similar in that sense. That’s why we get along so well.”
As for the seeming suddenness of their relationship, considering Miley was seeing Kaitlynn Carter as recently as last month, Simpson explained, “The reason why it hasn’t been a really crazy sudden thing is just because we’ve been friends for so long.” He and Miley “found each other again in a space where we’re both not partying, working real hard, and it just keeps things healthy and it’s good.”
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Meanwhile, it’s been barely two months since Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth revealed that they had separated after less than a year of marriage, but after spending the better part of a decade as a couple. Cyrus, who was already off vacationing with Carter, initially indicated that she wasn’t sure whether the breakup was for good, but Hemsworth filed for divorce a couple weeks later.
After she and Simpson were first spotted making out this month, she took to social media and basically encouraged inquiring minds to relax.
“I am just trying to THRIVE/survive in a ‘mans’ world,” Miley wrote. “If our president can ‘grab em by the p—y…,’ can’t I have a kiss and açaí bowl?”
As part of a lengthy treatise on the state of her dating life (“this ‘dating’ thing is new to me too”), she also wrote, “Don’t f–king pity me, not what I’m asking for. I have a great life I wouldn’t trade for ‘privacy’ but PLEASE don’t make this awkward for me! I am trying to make light and like always MAKE FUN of myself / and the public’s perception of me! Get used to me dating-this is where I am! #HotGirlFall.”
Simpson, who also doesn’t appear to have been lonely in between serious relationships over the years, is on board.
Cyrus “is not looking for anything serious,” a source told E! News earlier this month. “She has known Cody for a long time and is very comfortable with him. There’s no strings attached and she is just going to see where each day takes her.”
Right now, the next big day on the schedule is Friday, when “Golden Thing,” the song her new BF wrote for her, is scheduled to heat up the internet. Simpson’s teaser post from Tuesday is a close-up picture of his GF’s neck boasting several delicate necklaces.
Miley had some queen emojis and one simple word for him in the comments section: “emotional.”