Cyrus is having a ‘special moment’
Billy Ray Cyrus is back, but did he really ever leave?
On this hot August morning, Billy Ray Cyrus sits in the family room of his brother’s house, which lies adjacent to his own sprawling property in the bucolic hinterlands of Nashville. He’s talking about — what else? — Old Town Road, then in its 19th week at the top of the charts, the longest such streak in history. At this moment, it still feels unstoppable, but Cyrus, a longtime student of chart positions, senses its record-shattering run is almost over, and he’s right. Within days, he and Lil Nas X will be deposed by Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy.
But the unlikely collaboration between the 58-year-old country singer from Flatwoods, Ky., and the 20-year-old rapper from Atlanta was still the unquestioned soundtrack of summer, ascending from viral smash to mainstream hit to world-eating cultural phenomenon. It created a special bond between them, which makes sense because Cyrus is one of the few people who can understand the very peculiar position Lil Nas X currently occupies. Achy Breaky Heart was the Old Town Road of its day, a genre-bending, gatekeeper-offending, once-in-a-generation crossover sensation that changed the culture forever.
“This young man had clearly defined exactly what he wanted to happen, and that’s the way you reach your dreams,” Cyrus says approvingly.
Cyrus has been at the forefront of the cultural conversation at three pivotal and very different points in the past 30 years: for Achy Breaky; for the Disney Channel smash Hannah Montana, in which he played the father of his real-life daughter Miley; and for Old Town Road. But Billy Ray Cyrus was always here, plugging along, even when the conversation turned away from him. He has been directed by David Lynch and befriended by George Jones, and he just performed at Glastonbury.
But unlike Friends or the Spice Girls, Achy Breaky Heart was a piece of ’90s pop culture few people felt nostalgic for. “I wish Billy Ray Cyrus would make a comeback” is not something anybody has ever said out loud, probably not even Billy Ray Cyrus.
Lil Nas X didn’t care about any of that, or maybe he just didn’t know. He had grown up with Hannah Montana, and Cyrus was one of the only country singers he was familiar with. In December, the rapper, hoping to create a viral moment for his brand-new country-trap song, tweeted in Cyrus’s direction (“twitter please help me get billy ray cyrus on this”).
In mid-March, Cyrus got an email from an executive at Columbia Records, asking whether he would listen to a track by a young Atlanta artist named Lil Nas X.
Cyrus made plans to enter the studio the next day. He spent hours studying Old Town Road like it was homework. “(I) learned it really good,” he says, “because it was different for me, but I loved it.”
Cyrus was paired with hip-hop artist and songwriter Jocelyn (Jozzy) Donald, who worked with him on his guest verse.
It was around this time that the original version of Old Town Road was deemed insufficiently country, and it was removed from the Billboard country charts. The decision brought usually subterranean issues of race and genre in the music industry into the daylight. Cyrus says he can’t really speculate on those, but he knew that whatever was happening wasn’t good. He was also worried that, as the designated country guy, his services would no longer be needed on a song he felt a connection to.
“I started freaking because something inside my spirit knew that this was a special moment, and something very important in my life,” he recalls. “It just looked like it was going to go away.”
When the remix landed atop the Billboard Top 100 a few weeks later, it wasn’t just a hit — it was a populist uprising. And it looked familiar: “The country world was trying to do to Lil Nas exactly what they did to Billy Ray Cyrus with Achy Breaky,” Jozzy says. “This was his redemption, a little bit.”
Cyrus’s first single was a goofy, danceable ear worm called Don’t Tell My Heart — until he politely suggested renaming it Achy Breaky Heart.
He and the song’s writer, Don Von Tress, soon became close friends. “I was struck by his charisma and his honesty,” Von Tress recalls. “Back in the day when everybody had to have a Stetson stapled to their forehead, here’s this guy with a mullet and a cut off sweatshirt and high-top tennies.”
Achy Breaky was instantly polarizing. Pop fans embraced it as a novelty hit. Country purists saw it as degrading and ridiculous. (That the accompanying video, featuring a hip-swivelling Cyrus, helped set off a nationwide line-dancing craze somehow made it worse.) His debut album went on to sell nine million copies.
Cyrus had enough post-Achy Breaky hits to fend off official one-hit-wonder status, but by the release of his third album, country radio no longer welcomed him.
Thanks to his Hannah Montana role, Cyrus was more famous than he’d been in years, but his music career was flagging. During the 2000s and much of the ’10s, he tried everything: Patriotic albums. Christian albums. Heavy metal. Dancing With the Stars. He ditched Billy Ray and renamed himself Cyrus. He even grew his mullet back, hoping audiences shared his nostalgia for that hairstyle. (They did not.)
By the time he and Von Tress finished The SnakeDoctor Circus, a concept album that emphasized topical concerns like opioid addiction, Cyrus thought he might never write another song. When SnakeDoctor was released in May, he says, “I figured that was probably it for me.” But now Cyrus is enjoying his third foray into pop cultural relevancy. He’s very famous again, but it’s an odd kind of fame: It’s his, but not his. He’s Hannah Montana’s dad, Lil Nas X’s sidekick. For Cyrus, celebrity has seldom directly translated into record sales. SnakeDoctor did not chart, even at the fevered height of Old Town Road.
His success this go-round might be proximal, but it’s also easier to handle. After decades in which he worked himself to exhaustion onstage and on sets, straining his marriage and missing large portions of his kids’ childhoods, he can now do exactly as he pleases. He enjoys collaborations with younger artists and recently released the country-rock throwback song Chevys and Fords, a collaboration with singer Johnny McGuire. He has begun writing songs again.
“I may just have peace of mind for the first time ever,” he says. “I feel like I can just lay my burden down.”
I started freaking because something inside my spirit knew that this was a special moment, and something very important in my life. It just looked like it was going to go away.