I Listened to the New Billy Ray Cyrus Album So You Didn't Have To

On June 3rd of this year, something glorious happened. Billy Ray Cyrus put out an album that was half new material and half a Greatest Hits collection. It was called The Distance, and no one paid attention to it. Except for me, when his publicist mailed a copy of it to my office. I decided to listen to it so you didn’t have to.

Note: I don’t know which Billy Ray Cyrus songs are new and which Billy Ray Cyrus songs are old except for “Achy Breaky Heart,” which is like the dopest song of 1992 and probably got Billy Ray Cyrus laid a gazillion times. If you were born in 1993 and don’t know who your dad is, it’s probably Billy Ray Cyrus. Sorry if you’re just now finding this out.

This song sounds like a Bon Jovi if the Bon Jovi guy had to take a crap really bad while he was in the vocal booth. Billy Ray Cyrus is singing about walking around his house by himself and wondering if he and his girlfriend will be together forever. This sounds like a Drake song for a stripper at a truck stop.

Sadly, this is not a song about the horrors of the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and instead some shitty bluegrass song where Billy Ray Cyrus tries to sing in a Hank Williams voice, if Hank WIlliams had to take a crap.

There is no way anyone could listen to this song in 2014 and not think about the, er, complicated relationship BRC must have with Miley Cyrus. On one hand, Miley is a fucking cash cow who probably made Billy Ray Cyrus more money than Billy Ray Cyrus ever made Billy Ray Cyrus. On the other, there are all these ridiculous tabloid stories about Billy Ray Cyrus getting really sad that Miley’s gone off the deep end. On the other other hand, Billy Ray Cyrus re-made “Achy Breaky Heart” into a trap song that whose music video finds him playing guitar in a spaceship while girls in thongs twerk around him. Anyways, the whole point of this is there’s this Greek myth where this guy Cinyras gets his daughter pregnant and she’s so horrified she gets the gods to turn her into a tree. Then Cinyras commits suicide. Clearly, Billy Ray Cyrus has never read up on Greek Mythology.

This is basically the same song as Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle,” where a dad doesn’t have time to hang out with his family and ruins his family. Somehow also about how he wants to have sex with his daughter.

Ah yes, the time-honored country tradition of acoustic guitars being strummed over breakbeats. Billy Ray Cyrus is singing about dropping his kids off at school and how awesome it is to be normal and not want money or status. Coming from an extremely rich, extremely famous dude, this is basically psychological warfare.

Aw fuck yeah. Call in the twerk team, IT’S MILEY BITCH! Oh wait, this is just another shitty country ballad. The awesome thing about this song is the lyrics are so empty that you can totally interpret them as being about how he wants to fuck Miley Cyrus and Miley being like “EW WHAT THE FUCK NO DAD JESUS!!!”

This song starts out as a simulacrum of all the parts of “Freebird” (except for the guitar solo) combined. It’s actually kind of dope, except when you realize it’s using the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash as an allegory for 9/11. Anyways, my uncle used to be in a band called Cannabis Jam, who changed their name to Space and then broke up because their drummer left to join Lynyrd Skynyrd. My uncle’s dope.

However you feel about John Bonham as a dude, there’s no getting around the fact that his drums on “When the Levee Breaks” are some of the most iconic slaps of all time, which is why the drums on this otherwise aggressively shitty song vaguely sound like them.

This is the country equivalent of T-Pain’s “Rap Song,” except Billy Ray Cyrus has the gawds George Jones and Loretta Lynn instead of Rick Ross.

Just from hearing the wilty sad piano in the intro, I’d say there’s a 90% chance this song is about 9/11. Oh wait, it’s a song about how we should honor our troops. Which, like, yeah, but also Billy Ray Cyrus writes off the horrors of PTSD by singing, “He went there a boy, he came back a man” in a voice that could curdle milk.

WE MADE IT GUYS, THE GREATEST AND BEST HIT OF BILLY RAY CYRUS’S CAREER. This song is a lot better when you hear it in a vacuum, I’m sure it was annoying as fuck when it was the biggest song in the universe.

Drew Millard is the Features Editor of Noisey and occasionally blogs about nonsense. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard

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