Hillbilly Heart (35 page)

Miley was happy. She didn’t have a chance to make friends at school like other kids her age. Tish and I liked him, too. He and Miley played guitar, wrote a lot of songs, and stayed at the house in Toluca Lake. In those days, we were still going to church every Sunday, and we took Justin with us, too. The church parking lot was always full of paparazzi. It was a freak show.

I was ecstatic when we celebrated Miley’s sixteenth birthday in November. Both Tish and I were gratified whenever we got to give her something that resembled normal life. Not that everything about this milestone was typical. Her first party was at Disneyland. Taped for a TV special, it included guest sightings of Tyra Banks, Steve Carell, Cindy Crawford, and Demi Lovato, plus me singing “Ready, Set, Don’t Go” and a four-song set from Miley herself.

We had a more private party at home where Tish and I gave Miley an SUV. She traded it in for a Prius, saying, “Thanks, guys, but I’d rather drive a car that’s better for the planet.” Tish and I took that as a sign our kids might be smarter and more sensible than us, and there was nothing wrong with that.

Parenting is something you do one day at a time. As we knew
from raising five kids (when they weren’t raising us), some days are better than others. Miley’s sweet sixteen was a good one.

Thoughout Miley’s life, I tried so hard to walk the line between best friend and father, keeping in mind that that’s what my dad was to me. But the line was quickly becoming blurred. She was growing up and doing her own thing, and that’s a difficult phase for any parent. Back in Tennessee, when we had shot the scene on top of the hill where Miley and I dueted on “Butterfly Fly Away,” I knew she was no longer the caterpillar mentioned at the beginning of the song. Out there on Carl Road, I literally saw the butterfly fly away, and I knew at that moment things would never be the same. And they weren’t.

I ended the year in San Diego, starring in the movie
Flying By
. It was an indie film about a frustrated real estate developer whose twenty-fifth high school reunion turns into an opportunity to rejoin his old band and have a second chance at rock-and-roll stardom. After a cross-country concert swing, I flew there with my dog Tex, and both of us stayed on my tour bus, which came down from L.A. and parked in an alley outside the soundstage.

It seemed like a sweet setup. I was going to play a rocker, Heather Locklear had signed on to play my wife, and the producers were going to use a few of my songs in the movie. Plus, I was living right outside where I worked. But as sometimes happens when things seem perfect, it turned out to be a pretty depressing time. I missed my family, who were all out on tour with Miley, and truth be told, I missed my life, or what I wished my life could be and what it had been: trees, horses, sitting in my teepee, playing with the kids, hanging out with Tish. The reality, though, was the kids were grown up, Tish was managing the career of a superstar, and I was downright lonely.

It was a desolate time. It rained almost every day. And maybe because I had so much time by myself, or maybe because the rest of the family was so far away, or maybe because of a combination of
both, it was becoming more and more obvious that our busy schedules were taking a toll on our family. I felt the strain, as if my world might be starting to unravel, like a rope beginning to fray. I knew that everything in this world comes with a price, but I asked myself: Was it worth it? I didn’t know.

What I did know was that life had somehow changed and there I was, sitting on my bus not in the happiest frame of mind, with a dull thud in my heart, confusion in my head, and a sense that there might be some problems up ahead. It was a little past midnight, and I started playing my guitar. And then, as often happens, those feelings that I couldn’t articulate began to flow out of me.

Moonlight comes callin’

On my window pane

Ain’t seen the sunlight

Lord, I’ve felt the rain on my skin

You're not here once again.

I check my cell phone

I read my mail

Cold wind keep blowin'

Right behind your cell

And you keep goin…

When will this misery end

Your picture’s in my head

I feel my heart break once again

You know I love you

Still you chose to leave that day

Lord, I’ve been broken

There’s still hope that I can mend

If I could see you once again…

CHAPTER 31

“Back to Tennessee”

I
N 2009, I VISITED
the troops in Germany, Iraq, and Afghanistan. One day, I was onstage in a giant hangar in Kabul when bombs went off nearby. I was in the middle of singing “Some Gave All.” I heard the explosion and felt the ground rumble. I stopped, concerned. Then, a soldier yelled, “Keep going, Mr. Cyrus. We’re used to it.”

I understood. Trusting fate was much better than acknowledging fear. In my own life, that meant moving forward no matter how lost or desolate I felt inside. In fact, there was no stopping or slowing down even if I’d wanted to. That April, within a two-week period, the
Hannah Montana
movie came out,
Flying By
premiered, and my latest album,
Back to Tennessee,
was released.

Before the year was up, I made two more movies,
Christmas in Canaan
and
The Spy Next Door,
starring Jackie Chan. I was exhausted, emotionally and otherwise. But take time off—why? To do what?

Tish and I had grown apart, and that chasm kept getting larger. Communication is the key to any relationship, new or long-term like ours, but we weren’t talking to each other the way we should have been.

Meanwhile, Miley made the movie
The Last Song,
her first dramatic
role, and she fell in love with her leading man, Liam Hemsworth, a handsome young actor from Australia.

During the making of the movie, controversy erupted at the Teen Choice Awards. Some accused Miley of pole dancing on top of an ice cream cart. “If you don’t like it,” she said to those who criticized her, “change the channel. I’m not forcing you to watch me.”

She wasn’t Madonna, but she had the same mettle. “If you think dancing on top of an ice cream cart is bad,” she said, “then go check what ninety percent of high schoolers are up to.”

Soon she added a couple of tattoos, including one over her heart that said “Just Breathe” and a tiny one inside her ear that said “Love.” There was no doubt that she was grown up and ready to move beyond
Hannah Montana.
“As I’ve grown into it,” she told
Parade
magazine, “I’ve grown out of it. Does that make sense?”

Tish and I left it up to her as to whether she wanted to continue the series, though everyone knew it was time to pull the plug. She didn’t want to do another season. She was done with the wigs and the sparkle.

We supported her. The thing people may not have realized about Miley is that she wasn’t a follower. From the beginning, she had a sense of wanting to blaze her own trail. I wonder where she got that. To her,
Hannah
was just the start. She was eager to discover what was next.

Just as
Hannah
had become a chore for her, I also was ready to finish the last season. The fun was gone. Miley and I were like two roads that had run side by side for miles, then suddenly one turned left and the other right. It was hard to smile in the barrel of that camera every day knowing the truth in our real lives: things just weren’t funny anymore.

The final episode was shot on May 13, 2010, Tish’s birthday. Everyone was primed for a wrap party. It was well-deserved, too. Four seasons of good, funny, family entertainment was worthy of a celebration. But just before we finished the last scene, I got a phone call from Tish saying that Noah had been thrown from a horse at
the L.A. Equestrian Center and was lying semiconscious in a hospital emergency room.

So I went there and sat till we got word our little baby was going to be fine. She’d suffered a minor concussion. I skipped the party and sat with Noah that night. That’s what daddies do.

I moved on from the
Hannah Montana
phase quickly. The proof was on my left arm. In early June, I spent an absolutely crazed forty-eight hours getting a sleeve of tattoos, including Chief Joseph, the Mayan calendar, and lots of words that meant something to me, including
BELIEVE, HOPE AND MUSIC CHANGES EVERYTHING, LIE TO ME
, and the one that said it all: a broken heart with the word
LATELY
written across it and an arrow running through it.

Afterward, the guy inking me noticed the word
Faith
was blurry. He wanted to fix it. I’d been with him for two days straight; another hour wasn’t going to make a difference. But I looked at it and said, “You know what? It’s a pretty perfect articulation of how my faith feels right now. I think you actually might’ve nailed it. My faith
is
blurry.”

It fit with my new music. For the past few months, I had been writing a new batch of hard-edged rock songs, and I formed a new band to play them. Brother Clyde consisted of Jamie Miller, Samantha Maloney, Dan Knight, and Dave Henning. I gave us a simple mantra: No rules. No limits. No preconceived notions. In other words, there was no asking what is Billy Ray Cyrus going to sound like? What is Billy Ray Cyrus going to look like? It didn’t matter. As always, I wanted the music to speak for itself.

And that’s exactly what Brother Clyde was about—the music. It was hard and dark, epitomized by our single, “Lately,” a dark, Sabbath-like rock anthem that came to me from Morris Joseph Tancredi and Jonathan Rivera and included a rap from King Phaze. The album also featured a country rocker called “The Right Time,” which Morris and I wrote for Dolly Parton, plus a cover of Johnny Cash’s “I Walk the Line,” recorded with a bunch of friends (Ed King,
Mike Estes, Johnny Neil, among them) one night in a basement in 1998. My son Trace also added vocals on the song “Alive.”

We debuted in June at a Harley-Davidson store opening in Kansas City. The two-day event was dubbed Worthstock. The mostly biker crowd embraced Brother Clyde’s take-no-prisoners repertoire, which ranged from “Crawl,” a grungy rocker I’d written while watching news coverage of the 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai to a cover of Mountain’s classic “Mississippi Queen.”

At the end of July, we rattled the walls at the Roxy nightclub on the Sunset Strip. It was a full-on attack that I closed with a chestnut from the old days, my cover of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell.” I will always love singing that song. A few weeks later, we headlined the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, South Dakota. During a break, a guy in the crowd yelled that he’d been at my show in Afghanistan when the bombs went off.

“You were there?” I asked. “In that little hangar?”

“Yes, sir,” he said.

We shook hands, grateful to be back on safe and sturdy ground in the United States. But it was when I left Sturgis and met up with Tish and Miley in Detroit that I realized the ground was still littered with land mines, the emotional kind. I arrived there on my tour bus. Miley was making the movie
LOL,
and they’d set up camp in a little house. I had my dogs, Tex and Fluke, with me, and as best as I can remember, I got there, took a look around, and realized everything I had ever thought about my marriage and what was going on in our lives—just the whole thing—was no longer the reality.

Long before Tish and I met, I had vowed that my own kids, if I had any, would never see me argue the way my mom and dad did when I was little. I didn’t want to deal with that scenario, but I knew that’s where we were headed. There was too much bullshit in the air. I tried to ignore the lies and the façade that had been woven around me because the truth just hurt too damn much.

So I called this place I knew in L.A. and had them send a Learjet
to Detroit to help me make a jump. A short time later, my dogs and I were headed back to Tennessee.

It was good to be home. I retreated into the woods just as I did as a kid when something bothered me. During the day, I roamed the trails. At night, I stayed in my teepee. I built a fire and stared up at the billions of stars in the Milky Way. I searched for answers. How had this happened? Why had it happened?

Why, why, why?
That word filled my head.
Why?

Fittingly, a storm blew in. The temperature dropped. A tornado touched down on the property and nearly blew away my teepee. One day it snowed. The bleak weather matched my mood. Then the most astonishing thing happened. Both Miley and Braison came to me, separately I should say, and said, “Dad, we know what’s going on. We know you’ve tried everything except one thing. Now you’ve got to do it.”