On her debut LP, The Hardest Part, the 22-year-old Noah Cyrus carves out a musical lane all her own, the direct result of a lot of life lived: heartbreak and rehab, loss and love. With some help from collaborator and producer Mike Crossey, and the exclusive use of live instruments, the record is a modern country-pop opus, cinematic and nostalgic. “Not a [single] computer sample,” she smiles. “I wanted to bring that warm, comforting feeling of Nashville.” That can be heard in the liberal use of pedal steel (like on “Mr. Percocet”), the bluegrass-influenced “Loretta’s Song”, the Eagles-esque “Unfinished” and the album’s title track, “Hardest Part”, stacked with ambient bird sounds, strings and a buried familial recording. It is a new take on pop-country for the Gen Z crowd: wise beyond its age, a minimalist’s take on maximalist production. To come from a musical family of this ilk—the chameleonic Miley Cyrus, the pop country icon Billy Ray Cyrus, the 2000s emo hero Trace Cyrus—brings opportunity and impossible expectation. “I put everything into the album,” she tells Apple Music. “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.” Here she walks through the stories behind each song on The Hardest Part. “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” (feat. 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.”