Miley Cyrus told Apple Music’s New Music Daily that she got sober earlier this year because she was afraid of joining stars such as Amy Winehouse, Kurt Cobain and Jimi Hendrix in the infamous “27 Club” of musicians who died at that age. “A fear of death is instinctual… 27 to me was a year that I really had to protect myself,” she said in Monday’s interview on her 28th birthday. “That actually really made me want to get sober because we’ve lost so many icons at 27. It’s a very pivotal time.”

Cyrus, who has long shared her love of the sticky-icky, revealed earlier this year that she had given up smoking weed to help her keep her head clear while working on new music. “You go into that next chapter or this is it for you. I just feel that some of the artists that almost couldn’t handle their own power and their own energy and their own force… It’s an energy,” she said of the sadly long list of artists who’ve died at that age, including the Rolling Stones’ Brian Jones, Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison.

And though she was determined not to become another statistic, Cyrus told NMD that she did recently have a slip a few weeks ago. “I would never sit here and go, ‘I’ve been fucking sober’… I fell off and I realized that I now am back on sobriety, two weeks sober and I feel like I really accepted that time,” she said. “One of the things I’ve used is, ‘Don’t get furious, get curious’. So don’t be mad at yourself, but ask yourself, ‘What happened?’”

Cyrus recently released the Dua Lipa collaboration “Prisoner,” which will appear on her upcoming (Nov. 27) album Plastic Hearts.

Watch the NMD interview below (sobriety talk begins at the 12:15 and 1:02:00 mark).