Breakout

Miley Cyrus was sixteen when Breakout arrived on July 22, 2008, through Hollywood Records, and the record's central purpose was to separate the singer from the character she had played on the Disney Channel since 2006. Her 2007 debut had been packaged as a double disc shared with a Hannah Montana soundtrack. This one carried only her name. Sessions ran around the Best of Both Worlds Tour, with Cyrus co-writing eight of the thirteen tracks and the production split among Matthew Wilder, Anne Preven and Scott Cutler, John Fields, and the Rock Mafia team of Antonina Armato and Tim James.

The sound leans pop rock, with power-pop guitars and a handful of ballads, and the lyrics stay close to subjects a teenager could speak to directly: a breakup catalogued in a list song, a small town that feels like a trap, a friendship that has run its course. The album also includes a cover of Cyndi Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun," recast at a slower tempo than the original.

First-week sales of about 371,000 copies put Breakout at number one on the Billboard 200, her second chart-topping album and, at the time, one of the few cases of a solo artist reaching that position twice before turning eighteen. It also hit number one in Canada and Australia and reached the top ten in the United Kingdom, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, Italy, and Hungary. The RIAA certified it platinum in the United States. [edit]