Jeff Nelson is the Senior Music Editor at PEOPLE. He has been with the brand since 2014, editing, writing and reporting across entertainment verticals.
Noah Cyrus is sitting in the control room of a San Fernando Valley recording studio when someone asks to adjust the AC. Cyrus, unprompted, pops up out of her chair and walks over to change the dial herself, then returns to her seat for a glam touch-up before this interview begins. It should come as no surprise that the singer-songwriter feels so at home here. She spent weeks in this very room, writing and recording her sophomore album, I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me, inside its wood-paneled and tree-bark-lined walls, surrounded by guitars, keyboards, speakers and other sonic accoutrements.
And while Noah, 25, lives in Los Angeles now, revisiting her hometown informed her acclaimed latest record. "I have been spending some time in Nashville and getting reconnected to that part of myself," she says. Given her musical pedigree, it's only natural that Noah—the daughter of "Achy Breaky Heart" singer Billy Ray, 63, and talent manager Tish, 58—deftly weaved country, folk and Americana into a sound all her own on the record.
"My dad literally has a story of Waylon Jennings holding me as a baby," she says. "Country music just feels like a part of me. . . . This album did feel like coming home, but it also just felt like me."
Noah certainly looks the part, evoking Priscilla Presley and country queen Crystal Gayle with her sleek mane trailing down to her waist as she later steps in front of the camera, blasting Lana Del Rey and Lady Gaga while posing for her People shoot in the studio's live room.
Since launching her career a decade ago, the youngest Cyrus sibling has been carving her own path while facing addiction and mental health struggles in the glare of a spotlight focused on her famous family. Now healthy and happily engaged, she has arrived with the July release of I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me. And she'd like you to get to know her.
"A lot of my career has been the journey of finding myself again," says Noah, who will hit the road to tour her new album on Sept. 12. "Now I know my sense of self, and I know what I want to write about and who I want to connect to. I'm at a place in my life where I don't think that people really know this part of who I am because there have been so many different variations of myself 'cause I was just growing up and I was changing," she says. "But I made it out on a really positive side of, I think, a really dark time that I was going through."
Music is, quite literally, in Noah's DNA.
"My dad's side of the family is very musically gifted and just love music. It's the bloodline that gave us the gift and love for music. It was the thing that brought them together -- and it's been the thing bringing us all together -- so music's been a constant through and through forever in the Cyrus family," says Noah, whose siblings have mostly all pursued musical endeavors. (Sister Brandi, 38, is a DJ and podcaster; brother Trace, 36, played guitar in the band Metro Station; sister Miley, 32, is a Grammy-winning performer; and brother Braison, 31, is a Nashville-based singer-songwriter.)
I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me brought four generations of Cyruses together. One track, "Apple Tree," features a sample of a recording of a hymn written by her great-grandfather, sung by her paternal grandfather. Another, "With You," was the first song her dad, Billy Ray, ever wrote. And her Fleet Foxes duet "Don't Put It All on Me" was actually inspired by Noah but written by brother Braison.
"It really was beautiful to have that bloodline [running] through the record," says Noah, who coproduced the album.
She points to one lyric from "Don't Put It All on Me" that rings especially true to her family dynamic: "The words that were spoken / Mean nothing to me."
"I think that really sums up a relationship with a sibling. There's so many times, especially in my relationship with my siblings growing up, you fight and you say things -- but that's your family, and they're always going to be there for you," says Noah,"and I'm lucky enough to say that that's been my case with me and my siblings and my family."
Furthermore, she tries to tune out the public's fixation on her family, which in recent years has included speculation of a rift after parents Billy Ray and Tish divorced in 2022. "I keep myself quite separated from any interest or 'drama' with the family. The one thing that's connected us with the entire world is music, and that's what's the most important to us," says Noah. "Yeah, it emotionally is draining, but it doesn't hurt us or touch us. It's something that you really learn to keep separate and far away from yourself."
For the record, "Everybody's great and loves each other," she adds of her family. "I think when you grow up with that being normal -- things being public -- that it doesn't quite reach you. At the end of the day, this is a family; that's really it: just going through normal family stuff."
Noah got a peek behind Hollywood's curtain at a young age, appearing on sister Miley's Disney Channel hit Hannah Montana and voicing the titular character Ponyo in the English version of the popular Japanese anime movie in 2008.
She launched her own music career in 2016, dabbling in experimental pop with her first single “Make Me (Cry)” with Labrinth and the follow-up “Again” featuring the late rapper XXXTentacion. Over the years she naturally began to return to her roots, infusing the Nashville storytelling she has running through her veins on her 2020 EP The End of Everything (standout “July” helped earn her a 2021 best new artist Grammy nomination) then her 2022 debut album,The Hardest Part.
In hindsight Noah realizes she gleaned some industry dos and don'ts watching Miley.
"I really saw [her early career] from the perspective of a sister and as a kid. By the time she was done with Hannah, I wasn't even driving a car yet -- I didn't even drive when she was doing Bangerz, so that puts it into perspective," she says. "But of course, there's situations that you experience, and you're like,'Okay,I will keep that in mind for the future and for:If that happens to me,how do I handle it?'So I've had a great role model for how it all works."
She's also gotten some advice from her father, who told her "to be the outlaw, whatever that means to you,whether it's thinking there's no box and not making the music that people expect you to make and making the decisions that people say are right," Noah says,"or just living by your own rules like Waylon and Johnny [Cash]."
Finding one's own voice when coming from a musical dynasty can be a daunting task.
"It was hard for me as a kid to trust in myself and my own identity and feel like that was enough," Noah says of making a name for herself,"but it is something that I think you just grow out of,and you grow with confidence.[Self-doubt]was something that I felt was put on me;that I then adopted and put on myself."
On her recent single "New Country," she sings of that inner turmoil she's felt: "To know where you are going when you don't know where you are / All these eyes on you / Waiting on you to fall / 'Cause the box they put you in just don't fit you anymore." She tapped country superstar Blake Shelton as a duet partner for "New Country," who sees firsthand the singular career Noah is creating for herself.
"I know she's got the talent and determination," Shelton tells People,"to step out and create her own legacy.I really am a big Noah fan --the person and the artist.I've got a lot of great history with the Cyrus family,and I'm thrilled to build on that,getting to work with Noah."
Noah found relief when she reprioritized herself. "I was struggling with severe depression and severe anxiety,and that was really hard to juggle while touring and not taking proper care of myself or allowing myself to do the proper therapy," she says. Now,she's more mindful about taking breaks in between projects. "The one thing that I'm really passionate about and that I know is that I want to keep living life.I do feel like I'm in the happiest and strongest place in my life."
With each new release, Noah has shown growth as both a songwriter and a person. That growth has been hard-won for the singer, who has taken control of her mental health after seeking help for a Xanax addiction in 2020.
"I feel a huge disconnect from the girl who was really struggling with addiction and the place that I was in," says Noah, who got hooked on the downer while in a former relationship. She knew she needed a change when she fell asleep mid-interview while promoting a project in 2020.
"Whenever I look at that time in my life, I'm just really deeply saddened for myself because only you really know what you're feeling inside and it's a feeling that I don't wish on anyone,to not want to be alive anymore,"she adds."I very much encourage people to talk about things if they're open and if they're ready to try to seek that help for themselves.Because I do think that you get to another point in life if you have the ability to try to take on the challenge of working and working on that process.I think there is a place that you get to where you have a much better outlook on things and you start to see a much more positive place that you're going to get to."
Making music has been "healing" too. "It was quite a cathartic experience creating the record," she says of I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me. "Some of the songs do feel a bit sacred and a bit spiritual in a way, where you may not be exactly talking about religion, but it feels like you're connecting to something larger than yourself."
Such is the case with album opener "I Saw the Mountains," a hymn-like ponderance on finding peace in the natural world. The track was inspired by falling in love with her fiancé, the fashion designer known as Pinkus, who proposed in 2023.
"My relationship now is a true partnership. It's something that I hold really close to us -- and also hold our privacy very close to us -- but in a way that I think that it also came out in songs like 'I Saw the Mountains,' " says Noah. "I wouldn't have written that song if I wasn't so newly excited about somebody and [had] that hope of living a life together and uniting with each other, especially whenever you are in a relationship with somebody new and they're on the other side of the world. So that gave me a lot of hope, that feeling of 'we're under the same stars; we'll be reunited one day; we'll figure things out.' So the journey of it all has been very beautiful; something that I'm very happy with and very grateful for is our relationship."
It was in meeting Pinkus—who popped by his fiancée's People shoot with their dogs Marshall and Mellow—that Noah had a realization.
"I want to be a mom. This is something that I want more than any other goal in my life," she says. "And that also ignited so much more excitement for me. I want to be alive for this; I want this to happen. And that was just something that I wasn't used to feeling because before I didn't really feel that connected to life. So this is a very strong place that I'm newly in; I'm in the happiest and best most secure spot I've been in in a very long time . . . and I think that the album was a huge helping hand in getting to this place."
Noah even got a permanent reminder of this peaceful time in her life etched onto her body. After her People shoot wrapped, the singer swapped her ethereal white Bora Aksu gown for sweats and a tank top to head home with Pinkus and their pups. Now visible on her left shoulder blade are Cyrus’s own lyrics, inked during a recent tattoo-parlor outing with her mom and sister. “I saw the mountains,” it reads,“and they saw me.”