Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Billy Ray on ‘Trail’ of a new sound

Billy Ray Cyrus says he gets ideas for songs from real life, which means he may be telling us about the time his wife, backing out of the garage, ran over his dog -- his achy, breaky dog -- on some future album.

"His back knee is turned around backward, completely crushed. His hip and back are broke and he's got internal bleeding," Cyrus said the day of the accident, earlier this week.

The good news is the dog's expected to live.

"I will be the new owner of the $6 million dollar dog," he said of Apache, the "50-50" (one blue eye, one brown eye) Alaskan husky he received Christmas morning.

"Santa brought him in as a little pup. He had a lot of different sicknesses as a puppy, but he had gotten to the point where he was running around the farm and going with me on horseback rides, then this happened to him and he's back in the hospital."

The accident precipitated a trip to the veterinarian and interrupted work on his forthcoming album, tentatively titled "Trail of Tears."

"My goal is to have all my tunes mixed by May the 1st," Cyrus said, speaking from his home in Franklin, Tenn., "and man, I've got to really hump it every day. I've been working from early morning till late at night."

The album, on which Cyrus has been working eight months, will contain 10 songs -- all of them originals except for a Merle Haggard cover ("Sing Me Back Home") that Cyrus calls "one of my first big favorite country songs."

It will be his first album since 1994's "Storm in the Heartland" -- and, he believes, his most soulful since "Some Gave All," his 1992 debut album that sold 10 million copies, mostly due to the smash single "Achy Breaky Heart."

For this one, Cyrus was co-producer (a first) with his guitarist, Terry Shelton, who wrote "Achy Breaky Heart." The result is a different sound.

"There were some other options of doing some different things," he says, "but I didn't want to go through the (Nashville) music factory and have it come out sounding like all the rest of the records.

"I insisted on using my own band (an allusion to "Storm in the Heartland," where he used studio musicians on four tracks) and I felt in my heart that was what I was supposed to do on this album."

As you might expect, Cyrus' life has changed drastically since 1992, when "Achy Breaky Heart" carried him into the national (and international) consciousness and instigated a dance craze.

"I lived inside of a Chevy Beretta three months before 'Achy Breaky' came out," he says. "At the end of '91, basically my home was a Chevy Beretta or wherever me and the band were playing. Shoot, as we speak right now, I'm standing out here on my farm, in a big old house. There are a bunch of rooms in here, but my domain is the outside. I have about 500 acres."

His favorite spot is atop a "big ol' hill."

"I got this big teepee up there," Cyrus says. "It's where I'm gonna be buried; it's in my will."

To the extent that "Achy Breaky Heart" catapulted him into the limelight, Cyrus achieved his musical goals in one shot.

"I was such a goal-oriented person that I wrote down my goals every day," he says. "My goal was that I wanted to be known as a successful singer-songwriter and entertainer-musician ... and be heard around the world."

Cyrus says it's still an ongoing process.

"Let's hope it's not over."

Reflecting on the "Achy Breaky" phenomenon, Cyrus says he felt the song was a potential hit before its release.

"All I knew is I liked the song a whole lot, but I didn't know what everybody else would think about it. To think that a first album would sell 10 million copies, that was beyond my expectations.

"What was neat for me is when I'd see on the news where people in Russia were doing the 'Achy Breaky,' or when I was touring Europe and Australia and would see how 'Achy Breaky' was touching the lives of so many different people of all ages."

And though the constant Cyrus-as-sex-symbol talk began to wear thin -- "after a while I started to think, 'Man are they listening to the songs?'" -- he recognized that it was just part of the territory.

"Heck, I was glad they was writing about something."

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