For Noah Cyrus, music and family are inextricable. The daughter of Billy Ray and sister of Miley, Noah Cyrus, 25, grew up in and around the music industry, beginning her own musical experiments as a teen and later finding her footing as an artist with the 2022 release of her full-length debut album, The Hardest Part.
Last week, Cyrus released that album’s follow-up, the striking and surprising I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me. Produced by Cyrus, Mike Crossey, and PJ Harding, the LP is clear-eyed and quietly confident, offering the clearest portrait yet of Cyrus as an artist and a person. Sonically, Cyrus leans into dreamy folk and indie soundscapes, tastefully weaving in threads of country, pop, and rock without subjecting the music to bloat.
Lyrically, the LP showcases Cyrus’s natural ability as a narrative songwriter, as she makes peace with a particularly tumultuous period of her life with hard-earned vulnerability and an ear for the poetic. There’s a quiet confidence to the music and to Cyrus’s performance, something she attributes to entering a new phase of her life.
“The record that you’re hearing is from an adult woman,” Cyrus says, catching up with Rolling Stone the day of the record’s release. “I was 21 when we released The Hardest Part. I’m 25 now, and I do feel like there’s a significant difference. In those three years I experienced a lot of growth, and it was important to me to show that growth within the record.”
The music also contextualizes Cyrus within her famous family. Her brother Braison, also a musician, wrote the Fleet Foxes collaboration “Don’t Put It All on Me,” a searching and subtly rendered ballad that points to Noah’s tendency to take on the problems of her loved ones. Billy Ray’s influence is heard on “With You,” a sweet and simple love song that happens to be the first song the superstar ever wrote. And Cyrus’s paternal grandfather, Ron Cyrus, recites a hymn written by his own father, Eldon Lindsey Cyrus, at the end of the track “Apple Tree.” Cyrus named the album after that hymn, which contains the line, “I want my loved ones to go with me,” and released the record on her grandfather’s birthday.
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“The album, whether it’s super clear or not, is quite conceptual,” Cyrus says. “It is about a lot of the same of characters. They relate to each other and relate to different parts of my life and different points in my life, whether that’s my great-grandfather or my father or my mother, or even my fiancé or my brother writing a song. There’s so much of my family’s lineage that inspires and is inside of this record.”
Those family connections go beyond the recorded music, too. The day after the album’s release, Cyrus made her Grand Ole Opry debut, performing on the same hallowed stage she watched her father stand on when she was a child. The full-circle nature of the moment was not lost on Cyrus, who called the opportunity “an honor and a privilege.”
“I grew up watching my dad play the Opry,” she says. “The Opry, like the album, has this nostalgic feeling that brings you back to a sense of family. For me, it’s going to be really cool to be going back there as an adult. And for my first time back there as an adult, I’m going to be on the stage, which is such a huge moment in any artist’s career.”
While her father’s country influence is clearly still strong, Cyrus is a voracious listener with wide-ranging appetites. Accordingly, I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me boasts an eclectic roster of guest artists, one that gives greater insight into the kind of music that has shaped Cyrus’s artistry.
Fleet Foxes frontman Robin Pecknold brings his trademark pastoral croon to “Don’t Put It All on Me.” Quickly rising country up-and-comer Ella Langley helps lighten the mood on “Way of the World,” a deceptively upbeat tune about the life cycle of grief. Blake Shelton co-signs Cyrus’s country bona fides on “New Country,” bridging generational gaps in the process. And perhaps the most surprising collaborator is the cult singer-songwriter Bill Callahan, who lends his rich, reedy baritone — Cyrus calls it “the voice of God” — to closing track “XXX.”
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“It is a very different and kind of misfit-y collection of people, right?” she says. “Like, Noah Cyrus with Blake Shelton, Ella Langley, Bill Callahan and Robin Pecknold? It’s a group that you wouldn’t have put together. It’s like you went into the high school cafeteria and picked people from all different tables. I think that’s what makes it really cool.”
I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me marks Cyrus’s first time in a producer’s chair, as she co-helmed the LP with trusted collaborators Crossey and Harding. She made the most of her role, ensuring the realization of her vision and taking advantage of the crash-course in album creation by taking active part in each stage of the process. As a result, the album is cohesive and has a strong point of view, with Cyrus’s perfectionist tendencies appearing in seemingly throwaway details that actually serve as the project’s glue.
“‘Apple Tree’ and ‘Man in the Field,’ they literally have a connection in their sound,” Cyrus says. “There’s reverb at the tail end of ‘Apple Tree’ that carries from start to finish throughout ‘Man in the Field.’ If you were to strip away everything except that part, you would just hear one hum, one note, all the way through the entire song. We wanted to bring that same ghost, that same spirit, to ‘Man in the Field.’”
There is a ghostly, almost haunted vibe to the album, particularly when Cyrus is addressing more personal matters in her lyrics. The specter of her parents’ very public divorce could loom over the album but instead takes its place within the broader exploration of love and grief, with Cyrus explaining she wrote about that time period from a place of “solace and acceptance.”
“Something I had to learn in the past two to three years is that no matter where you go, there you are,” she says. “Learning to be there for yourself, that’s really hard… But I’m not looking at the record, and the topics around the record, from inside. I feel like I’m looking from the other side of it, where I’m so clear, where I’m talking about these really heavy subjects that were really painful at the time. But it’s like, ‘Okay, this is my understanding of it right now.’ This is all coming from an understanding place.”
There’s plenty of lightness on the album, too, like on the dazzling opening track “I Saw the Mountains,” which Cyrus says was inspired by her then-burgeoning relationship with her now-fiancé, the German fashion designer Pinkus. She shares that their relationship afforded her a sense of stability while she worked on both the album and on healing her emotional wounds.
“This record, it comes from the perspective of not Noah Cyrus or what the world thinks Noah Cyrus is going through, or what the world thinks Noah Cyrus goes through during her parents’ very public divorce,” she says. “That’s not the perspective of this. The perspective of this is a daughter and a sister and a fiancée and a real woman in this world, who goes through the same things that everyone goes through. Mine has just been publicized.”
That sense of peace and closure Cyrus feels around her personal life extends to the album itself. Though she’s prone to tinkering and over-thinking while making music, she admits this is the happiest she’s ever felt about releasing a new project.
“I wouldn’t change a thing about this album,” she says. “I’ve never felt like that about my work before.”
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Cyrus says that the LP “technically isn’t over” after the final notes of closing track “XXX” ring out: She has plans for a forthcoming deluxe edition to arrive sometime in the future. Until then, she hopes this initial batch of music can bring peace to listeners, too, and looks forward to seeing the songs take on lives of their own.
“Everything about the album feels like it’s come as a gift,” she says. “It’s definitely connected me to my spirituality more. Even though I don’t have a label for my spirituality, I believe in God and I believe that there was a gift given to me on this record. That’s something that’s going to last forever.”
