Noah Cyrus courageously treats family relationships on a new country album

For Noah Cyrus, music and family are inextricable. The daughter of Billy Ray and Miley’s sister, Noah Cyrus, 25, grew up in and around the music industry, starting her own musical experiences in adolescence and later finding her place as an artist with the release in 2022 of her first complete album, The most difficult part.

Last week, Cyrus released this album, The Straw I want my loved ones to have me with me. Produced by Cyrus, Mike Crossey and PJ Harding, the LP is clear and silent, offering the clearest portrait to date of Cyrus as an artist and a person. On the sound level, Cyrus looks at the folk and independent sound landscapes, tastefully weaving in the sons of country, pop and rock without submitting music to the bloating.

On the lyrical level, the LP presents the natural capacity of Cyrus as a narrative author-songwriter, because it makes peace with a particularly tumultuous period of its life with a harshly won vulnerability and a ear for poetics. There is a quiet confidence for the music and the performance of Cyrus, something she attributes to the seizure of a new phase of her life.

“The file you hear is an adult woman,” said Cyrus, catching up Roller The day of the disc. “I was 21 when we went out The most difficult part. I am 25 years old now and I have the impression that there is a significant difference. During these three years, I have experienced a lot of growth, and it was important for me to show this growth within the file. »»

Music also contextualizes Cyrus within its famous family. His brother Baison, also a musician, wrote the collaboration Fleet Foxes “Do not put everything on me”, a search walk and subtly made which shows Noah’s trend to take the problems of her loved ones. The influence of Billy Ray is heard on “With You”, a sweet and simple love song that happens to be the first song that the superstar has ever written. And the paternal grandfather of Cyrus, Ron Cyrus, recites a hymn written by his own father, Eldon Lindsey Cyrus, at the end of the song “Apple Tree”. Cyrus named the album according to this hymn, which contains the line, “I want my loved ones to go with me”, and released the disc on the day of his grandfather’s birthday.

“The album, whether super clear or not, is quite conceptual,” explains Cyrus. “These are a lot of characters. They relate to each other and relate to different parts of my life and to different points of my life, whether it is my great-grandfather or my mother, or even my fiancé or my brother who writes a song. There is so much line of my family who inspires and is inside this disc.”

These family ties also go beyond recorded music. The day after the album’s release, Cyrus made her debut at Grand Ole Opry, performing on the same sacred scene on which she looked at her father when she was a child. Nature in a complete circle of the moment was not lost for Cyrus, who called the opportunity “an honor and a privilege”.

“I grew up watching my father play opry,” she says. “Opry, like the album, has this nostalgic feeling that brings you back to a sense of family. For me, it will be really cool to be returned there as an adult. And for my first time there as an adult, I will be on stage, which is such a huge moment in any artist career.”

Although the influence of his father’s country is clearly still strong, Cyrus is a voracious auditor with large -scale appetites. Therefore, I want my loved ones to have me with me has an eclectic list of guest artists, which gives an overview of the type of music that has shaped the artistic talent of Cyrus.

Fleet Foxes singer Robin Pecknold brings his pastoral crop of the brand to “don’t put everything on me”. The rapid elevation of the country, Ella Langley, helps to clarify the atmosphere on “Way of the World”, a misleadingly optimistic melody on the life cycle of sorrow. Blake Shelton co-signs in the good faith of Cyrus country on the “new country”, filling generational gaps in the process. And the most surprising collaborator is perhaps the singer-songwriter-interest cult Bill Callahan, who lends his rich baritone to Reedy-Cyrus calls him “the voice of God”-to the “XXX” fence.

“It’s a very different and unsuitable collection of people, right?” she said. “Like, Noah Cyrus with Blake Shelton, Ella Langley, Bill Callahan and Robin Pecknold? It is a group that you would not have set up. It is as if you were in the cafeteria of the school and that you have chosen people of all the different tables. I think that is what makes you really cool.”

I want my loved ones to have me with me Mark the first time of Cyrus in a producer chair, as it co-organized the LP with confidence collaborators Crossey and Harding. She pulled the best party from her role, guaranteeing the realization of her vision and taking advantage of the accident course in the creation of albums by actively participating in each stage of the process. Consequently, the album is consistent and has a strong point of view, with the perfectionist trends of Cyrus appearing in apparently disposable details which actually serve as a glue of the project.

“” Apple Tree “and” Man in the field “, they literally have a connection in their sound,” said Cyrus. “There is reverberation at the end of” Apple Tree “which carries from start to finish throughout” man on the ground “. If you were to divert everything except this part, you would just hear a buzz, a note, throughout the whole song.

There is a ghostly atmosphere, almost haunted from the album, especially when Cyrus addresses more personal questions in his words. The specter of the very public divorce of his parents could be loomed in the album, but rather takes his place in the broader exploration of love and sorrow, with Cyrus explaining that she wrote during this period from a place of “comfort and acceptance”.

“Something I had to learn in the past two to three years is that no matter where you are going, you are there,” she said. “Learning to be there for yourself, it’s really difficult … But I don’t watch the disc, and the subjects around the disc, from the inside. I feel like looking at the other side, where I’m so clear, where I am talking about these really heavy subjects that were really painful at the time. All this comes from a place of understanding.”

There is also a lot of lightness on the album, as on the dazzling opening piece “I SAW The Mountains”, which, according to Cyrus, was inspired by his then burgal relationship with her now fiancé, the German fashion designer Pinkus. She shares that their relationship gave her a feeling of stability while she worked both on the album and on the healing of her emotional wounds.

“This record, it comes from the point of view of Not Noah Cyrus or what the world thinks that Noah Cyrus crosses, or what the world thinks that Noah Cyrus crosses during the very public divorce of his parents,” she said. “This is not the prospect of this.

This feeling of peace and closure that Cyrus feels around his personal life extends to the album himself. Although she tends to tinker and think too much by making music, she admits that it is the happiest that she has ever felt to publish a new project.

“I would not change anything about this album,” she says. “I have never felt like this before about my work.”

Cyrus says that the LP “technically is not over” after the final closing notes of the “XXX” track sound: it has plans for a next luxury edition to arrive in the future. Until then, she hopes that this batch of initial music will also be able to bring peace to listeners, and is eager to see the songs take their own life.

“Everything about the album seems to be a gift,” she says. “It definitively connects me more to my spirituality. Even if I have no label for my spirituality, I believe in God and I believe that there was a gift that was given to me on this disc. It is something that will last eternally.”