YOU CAN TELL HIS HEART
BILLY RAY CYRUS IS BACK, BUT HE NEVER REALLY LEFT
On this hot August morning in Tennessee, 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, Ken., and the 20- year- old rapper from Atlanta was still the unquestioned song of summer, ascending from viral smash to mainstream hit to world- eating cultural phenomenon. It created a special bond between the pair, which makes sense because Cyrus is one of the few people who can understand the very peculiar position currently occupied by Lil Nas X.
Achy Breaky Hear t 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 is serious and polite and peppers his conversation with a mixture of backwoods mysticism, shrewd observations on the entertainment industry and Dale Carnegie- esque inspirational sayings. He believes in intuition, and spirits. He looks for signs in things.
He has also been at the forefront of the cultural conversation at three pivotal and very different points in the last 30 years: for Achy Breaky, the Disney Channel smash Hannah Montana, in which he played the father of his real- life daughter Miley, and 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. How weird is that? Unlike Friends or the Spice Girls, Achy Breaky Heart was a piece of ’ 90s pop culture few people felt nostalgic for. 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 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. There was an accompanying link to a site called Tiktok. Cyrus was mystified. “I’m going, ' Who is Lil Nas? And what is Tiktok?' "
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.”
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. “My spirit was just going crazy, and I kept pushing. 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 was something that looked familiar.
Back in the late 1980s, Cyrus played to overflow crowds every night at the Ragtime Lounge in Huntington, W.V. He could have reigned there indefinitely, but he was closing in on 30, and he worried that if he didn’t get a record deal soon, he never would. His intuition also told him something good was about to happen. He played his song Some Gave All, an ode to veterans, for Harold Shedd at Mercury Records and got a record deal on the spot.
His first single was a goofy, danceable ear worm called Don’t Tell My Heart. At least that’s what it was called until Cyrus, who had field- tested the song for audiences at the Ragtime, politely suggested renaming it Achy Breaky Heart.
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 postAchy Breaky hits to fend off official one- hit- wonder status, but by the release of his third album, country radio no longer welcomed him. His father suggested he reinvent himself as an actor, like Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton did.
Parton and Cyrus had been friends for years. Parton embraced the entire Cyrus family, which grew to include his second wife, Tish, and six kids. ( Dolly is godmother to Miley.) Parton describes Cyrus in an email thusly: “He’s tender but tough, pretty but rugged, mysterious but personable. He’s a man’s man but definitely a woman’s kind of guy! Oh, and did I mention he’s talented? He’s a great singer, songwriter, and entertainer. I’ve loved him from the start.”
Parton also urged him to diversify. Cyrus set his mind to acting and soon found himself with a small part in Lynch’s 2001 mind- bending masterpiece, Mulholland Drive. Cyrus went on to play a small- town doctor who moves to the big city in the Pax network series Doc, which ran for 88 episodes. In 2005, he was cast as Robby Stewart in Hannah Montana, opposite a tweenage Miley, who played a pop star undercover as an ordinary girl.
The series launched his daughter into orbit and gave Cyrus a new public identity: Miley’s dad. 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 that audiences shared his nostalgia for that iconic, long- ago hairstyle. ( They did not.)
But now Cyrus is enjoying his third foray into pop cultural relevancy in as many decades. 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.
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 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.”
The one word Cyrus repeatedly uses to describe his life after Old Town Road is “magical.” “It’s just a beautiful, magical story that I look back on and I go, ' I can’t imagine my life now without it,'" he says. “I never dreamed another one would come back around. I would’ve been fine. But now, looking back on it, this was my story.”