While the Miley Cyrus performance that everyone remembers from last year was her MTV VMA twerkfest, the singer's favorite performance of 2013 came at a different awards show, and now, Miley is finally explaining what she was thinking when she came up with the totally bizarre concept for it.

The performance in question was "Wrecking Ball" at the American Music Awards, and you may recall that Miley sang the ballad in front of a giant screen that showed an enormous kitten crying diamonds as it lip-synched along to the song.  Miley tells Entertainment Weekly that she found the image of the kitten on Tumblr, and decided she wanted to incorporate it as part of the number.

"I’m obsessed with cats but I have four dogs so I can’t have a cat. But I am obsessed with cats," she tellsEW. "So I found this cat and sent it to [her video director] Diane Martel, and we turned it into this little GIF."  

As for why she felt the cat was the right image, she explains, "For some reason, when I saw it, I felt like it would be the saddest thing to see this cat sing ‘Wrecking Ball’ with me. I had to track down the dude who made [the original Tumblr post] who lives in Japan [to get permission]."

She adds, "I think a lot of kids knew what that cat was. They had seen that cat online before because it got passed around on Twitter.”

"We just kept trying to make it better and sadder,” Miley tells EW. “That’s why we added the tears and had it crying diamonds. The reason why it cried diamonds is because I call Diane Martel ‘Diamond.’”

Miley says the crying kitten concept was something she had "saved" for the AMAs because the award show took place the day after her 21st birthday. "I wanted to do my favorite performance on my birthday," she tells EW.