Billy Ray Cyrus has been through it over the past five years. The “Achy Breaky Heart” country star and father of Miley Cyrus has struggled through two divorces, a near-fatal battle with sepsis that left his vocal cords paralyzed and a nasty, public falling out with his family that overshadowed his unexpected romance with actress Elizabeth Hurley.
“I had entered a period where I hadn’t worked for a really long time. And then I realized today, I said, ‘Cyrus, you’re working now, man. Be careful what you ask for. You said you wanted to get on the ride? Well, here you go,'” he told People magazine in a new cover story about his upcoming return to music after a nearly seven-year hiatus with the album The Hill (June 16).
Cyrus, 64, has been largely off the musical radar since his 2019 album, The SnakeDoctor Circus. In the interim, he divorced his wife of nearly 30 years, Tish Cyrus — with whom he shares Miley, 33, son Braison, 32, and daughter Noah, 26 — in 2022, before things took a dark turn he refers to as a “low point” in his life.
After getting engaged to Australian singer Firerose (born Johanna Hodges) just months after his divorce and marrying in Oct. 2023, Cyrus filed for divorce less than eight months later in a contentious split in which he cited irreconcilable differences and “inappropriate marital conduct.” That was followed by an emergency motion accusing Firerose of making nearly $100,000 in unauthorized “fraudulent” credit card charges; her attorneys labeled those claims “untrue.”
“When you’re completely on the bottom, that is the only way to go — up,” Cyrus said about the fallout from the brief marriage his attorneys labeled a “nightmare” in announcing the couple’s divorce settlement in August 2024. Saying he’s been “to hell and back a couple of times,” Cyrus noted that his family supported him during a 2024 bout of vocal paralysis following a near-fatal battle against sepsis that required hospitalization. Now, he’s happy that things have settled down in his private, including a seeming rapprochement with his children.
“Life is a series of adjustments, and I think my family always knew that,” he said. “We’ve all been through a lot, and we’ve seen a lot. Whatever happened is in the rearview mirror. The past is over and done. The future is what we have, and we got to look forward.”
As proof, son Braison produced and helped co-write his dad’s new album and daughter singer Noah duets with him on the moody cowboy lament “On Our Way Along.” “All these years later it’s going back to our roots as a family,” Cyrus said. “And to be in this moment with them, it’s just a great celebration of our family.” He’s also proudly smitten with Hurley, who he went official with last Easter Sunday after the pair first met on a movie set in 2022.
Watch the “On Our Way Along” below.