Mr. Hannah Montana's Achy Broken Heart

These days Billy Ray Cyrus's life is imitating a bad country song: He's headed for a messy divorce, his record company just delayed his latest comeback, and his cherished 18-year-old daughter seems destined to rip bong hits at every party in the U.S.A. No wonder he's muttering about the end times.

He has a favorite chair at the circular wooden table in the modest kitchen of his Tennessee mansion where he spends much of his time, and he prefers it here with the lights out. When I first arrive he makes me a cup of tea in the microwave, and we face each other as people generally do, fully illuminated, but after a while he asks me whether I'd mind. He flicks a switch behind him, and sinks into shadow.

The last few months, he's been living here alone. At the end of August he left the Los Angeles house where his family moved four years ago after his daughter Miley was cast in the Disney teen drama Hannah Montana, the show that would launch her as the pop-culture sensation of her day. He returned to the hundreds of acres of prime Tennessee countryside he had bought with cash in the early '90s in the wake of "Achy Breaky Heart," the song that launched him as the pop-culture sensation of his day. In late October he filed for divorce from Miley's mother, Tish. It's been a tough year, and it keeps getting tougher. This is exactly where he was sitting five days earlier when he opened a link on his Mac PowerBook and—alongside millions of voyeurs with far less at stake—watched footage of Miley smoking a bong and talking some kind of crazed nonsense in celebration of her eighteenth birthday.¹ This is where he was when he tweeted his response:

Sorry guys. I had no idea. Just saw this stuff for the first time myself. Im so sad. There is much beyond my control right now

···

"My kids learned to color on this table. There's been a lot that's went around this table. Waylon Jennings sat right there in that chair and showed Miley the chords to 'Good Hearted Woman.' Sitting in that chair. This table's a bit like life. It's a circle. And I believe everything in life is a circle. You come into this world a little teeny wrinkled-up fetus..."

This is how Cyrus begins. The first hour I barely speak. After a long soliloquy about the table, he fetches his guitar and tells me he's written a complete new album in the last three weeks. "Not by choice," he says. "The one I wrote this morning is called 'Feels Like Goodbye.'" It's unexpectedly stark, simple, and beautiful, its opening lines an unacknowledged, desolate, distant echo of the song that paid for this house in the first place:

Cold wind's blowing

Sat here knowing

My heart's about to break

When he finishes, he fetches a black-and-white photo of his father's gospel group, the Crownsmen Quartet, and tells me how his father ended up dying of mesothelioma from working in the steel mill, and about his Pentecostal-preacher grandfather and the Sunday-morning church music of his youth, and describes how shameful it felt back in Kentucky in the '60s to have parents who got divorced, to be forced to confess in school that he had a half-brother and half-sisters and stepsisters and no telephone. "There was always that misfit-ness," he says. He points to the picture that sits next to his father's on the dresser, of Geronimo, and reminisces that as a child he used to spend hours running through the woods on his own, pretending he was the legendary Apache leader. Soon he is telling me his whole origin story: how he wanted, and expected, to become the catcher for the Cincinnati Reds until he won a radio competition for concert tickets while he was working in a Kentucky tobacco warehouse, and how Neil Diamond paused during the song "Holly Holy" to say, "I don't care if you're white or black, rich or poor, man or woman, if you believe in your dreams and you live for the light and God's love, you can be anything you want to be in this world," and how at that very moment Cyrus felt as though hands were covering his entire body and he heard a voice he took to be God's telling him that he had to buy a guitar. And how he spent the next decade failing in Nashville and in Los Angeles, unable to fit in either, until on the verge of giving up he talked his way into the record contract that led to the hit single "Achy Breaky Heart" (a song he didn't write) and the accompanying Some Gave All, the best-selling album of 1992 (most of which he did write). I suspect it is a story that has become more mythic in retelling, with all its magical last chances and desperate down-on-one's-knees prayers, and not every minute detail of his account chimes with other, messier contemporary versions of his rise, but there seems little chance of, or point in, stemming his flow.

After a while, he circles back to the subject of circles themselves: of birds' nests, and of tornadoes, and of this table between us, and of himself. "I'm right back where I started—I'm still just sitting here writing bar-band music," he says, and strums me another. These new works will have to wait their turn, however. First Cyrus has an album of patriotic songs, I'm American, an idea directly sparked by a trip to Iraq and Afghanistan in 2009, and for which he has also rerecorded the title track of his first album, the story of the Vietnam veteran who told him, "All gave some, but some gave all."

That is ostensibly why he is giving this interview—though he's just been told the album won't come out until Memorial Day—and for a long time I'm unsure whether the protracted near monologue that has greeted me indicates an unwillingness to engage with recent problems or is his way of getting to them in his own time. More the latter, it turns out. He is talking about money when the conversation swerves.