- 2022-09-18
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MUSIC
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Noah Cyrus Releases Debut Album “The Hardest Part”: Streaming
American singer-songwriter Noah Cyrus released her highly-anticipated debut album “The Hardest Part” along with a new music video for “I Just Want a Lover” on September 16, 2022 via Records, LLC and Columbia Records.
The album comprises 10-track, featuring guest appearance from Benjamin Gibbard.
She made the album with producer Mike Crossey, who is known for his collaborations with Wolf Alice and Arctic Monkeys.
Noah Cyrus and Mike Crossey crafted a modern country-pop opus, cinematic and nostalgic the album the exclusive use of live instruments.
Noah Cyrus told Apple Music, “Not a [single] computer sample. I wanted to bring that warm, comforting feeling of Nashville.”
She continued, “I put everything into the album. It was my main focus. It was my love, and I was obsessed with creating it the entire time. Thematically, I touched so much on love and loss and death and life and heartache and addiction and mental health. There's a lot, but in a way, they all have a connection.”
Noah Cyrus said, “These songs all mean so much to me—they're straight from my heart, my brain, and my body. Every song is important to the story, and for the first time I'm revealing my complete and honest truth.”
She added, “Creating the arrangements was the most fulfilling part of this record. Mike and I were so driven and fully engulfed in the music. It was seamless—our brains connected into one. I found a safe place to make music with people I love and trust. The process was really healing for me.”- rA4brr4F98E
The album is inspired by her father Billy Ray Cyrus, who is American country singer and actor.
She shared, “i'm thinking a lot about my home in nashville.. the coyotes in the distance, my dad leading me through the fields where i used to run as a little girl, the horses, the deer in the grass, the sunsets and the songs. this is where i developed much of the sonic landscape of the record and found the majority of my inspiration.”
She told The Daily Beast, “I definitely am my father's daughter, so I was extremely inspired by back home and those sounds. And my dad was a huge inspiration on this record—lyrically and narratively, but also in the music. I feel like my dad is a huge reason why I have the background in music that I do, and is who brought on that passion in me from such an early age. My dad is such a passionate person, and I'm so much like him. I'm also extremely emotional. I've been that way since I was a kid. I'm just super sensitive and really in touch with my feelings, and I realized that putting that into my music was a superpower.”-
Noah Cyrus explained track-by-track for the album via Apple Music.
“Noah (Stand Still)”
“I was six months into my recovery process and the first line of 'Stand Still' came from a conversation I had with one of my best friends around my 20th birthday. I said, 'I don't know if I'm going to make it to another birthday.' My dad, very frequently, just kept saying the words to me, 'Just stand still.' It's a saying in our family, starting with my dad's grandfather. It's advice given for generations and generations. And that really saved my life.”
“Ready to Go”
“'Ready to Go' is about how I'm extremely incapable of letting go when I am invested in and love someone. I actually had written that song a couple years back and [musician] PJ [Harding] and I retouched it, to bring it closer to where I'm at now. The majority of the record is about 2020, that year during lockdown.”
“Mr. Percocet”
“I wrote 'Mr. Percocet' about the emotional and drastic mood changes, the swings and shifts of the withdrawal of Percocet when somebody's using them frequently. You're a bit irritable. I felt it affected the person I was in a relationship with—I never knew what I was going to get with them. 'Do you still love me? Are you mad at me? Do you hate me?' Because I would take the drastic change in personality as something I had been doing wrong.”
“Every Beginning Ends” featuring Benjamin Gibbard
“I'm a huge Death Cab [for Cutie] fan and have been for a very, very long time. I've found a lot of similarities in our writing, and I know that's because he's influenced me so much. We had a few days together, and we started another song, and it was amazing of course, but it didn't really take off. The next day I think I just said, 'Want to try writing a duet?' The song came quite seamlessly, and Ben is playing the instruments on the record. He was on drums, and that's his acoustic guitar and piano.”
“Hardest Part”
“The soundscapes that are in the song, they're from a video I took on my dad's farm of a hawk circling its babies in a nest up in the tree. And my grandmother, who just passed away, we got her a little keyboard for her house, and that same day she had played 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow.' We took the chords out and we put [that recording] into the song. You don't really hear it—it's bits and pieces—but there is a piece of my grandmother on that song.”
“I Just Want a Lover”
“I call this one my Dolly song. I don't know if it's that piano or 'the twistin' of the knife,' that melody in the chorus, but it gives me that classic country, upbeat record. Classic melody, classic sounds on that piano, that guitar. I kept hearing this sunburst '70s acoustic guitar underneath the piano in the chorus, and that element just made flames all over the track.”
“Unfinished”
“'Unfinished' has actually been a contender for first albums since I was 15 years old. It was more mature than I was at the time. I knew that it was such a special song. I felt like I wrote my story quite prematurely and I maybe caused some of [the bad relationship stuff in the song] to happen by putting it out in the universe. I clearly wrote out something I lived much later on in my life. And the Eagles were a huge inspiration behind this song.”
“My Side of the Bed”
“I focused so hard on the sub-bass with this song. It was so important for me to allow the listener to hear what I was feeling when I say, 'I sink in the sofa, watching that TV glow.' Because that's how it feels when the substance has just started working and you're comfortable, and you feel very safe. All problems have gone away; you're in your own bubble. I wanted the sub-bass to make it feel like it was a surround sound, that you are engulfed in that feeling. I think we went through about 14 mixes of that song.”
“I Burned LA Down”
“The live strings are by Rob Moose. So fucking beautiful. Lyrically, this song gave me the same feeling I got when I had written 'The End of Everything' and 'I Got So High That I Saw Jesus' and 'July.' I was like, 'Man, this song feels like it lasts forever.' That's advice I got from John Mayer: 'Keep writing music that people will sing forever.'”
“Loretta's Song”
“Loretta is my mom's mom. We lost her August 19, 2020. That was in the midst of the lockdown and also right in the height of my addiction. I wasn't emotionally available to my mother. At the time of writing 'Loretta's Song,' I had wished so badly that I had called a couple more times. My grandma was spiritual, and I wrote this song in memory of her and her [late husband]. She never remarried, she never dated, she never did anything after her husband passed away. I knew that when she laid down to rest, he was going to be right there when she woke up in her new body, she had left her earthly body and was into the next. She was reunited with her husband, my grandfather, and so that belief gave me a lot of peace and a lot of comfort.” - source : Apple Music
