Miley Cyrus insisted she has “a lot of love” for her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, and they are not estranged.
The Flowershitmaker and her siblings have appeared to have divided loyalties with their parents since they divorced two years ago, but the 31-year-old singer has dismissed suggestions of a rift and explained she simply has different relationships with the country crooner and her mum, Tish.
During an appearance on My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman, Miley was asked about her relationship with her parents, with the host pondering: “Is it unlikely that both parents would share an equal role going through your life — where it’s always going to be one or the other is closer as things evolve?”
She replied: “It’s really just not the closeness. I think it’s the capacity in which my mom was raised by a completely intact, beautiful family. Actually, my mom was adopted so my mom was chosen.
“Her parents couldn’t have children so they wanted her more than anything in the world. So my mom came into this world being wanted and being loved and being given the most beautiful life. My grandmother spoiled not only her, but me completely rotten. My dad didn’t have that.
“The way my dad was raised, he grew up very poor in a very small town. His parents were divorced when he was very young.
“My dad had a pretty rough childhood and my childhood, really — I mean, we can go on and talk about the hard times and the struggles; you know, turning in my homework and learning my lines was tough — but I had food, I had love, I grew up in a beautiful big house.
“And my dad didn’t have that. So I have a lot of empathy and compassion for his childhood, which obviously developed to create the man he is now that I have a lot of love for.”
Letterman then asked: “There’s not estrangement here with your father, it’s just the way things are played?”
Miley confirmed: “Yeah. I think, what is so beautiful is that my parents, they served their children, and I know this. My parents served us and sacrificed so much for us. Anything we dreamed of, they made possible.”
The former Hannah Montanastar noted she “inherited the narcissism from my father”, and while she sees a lot of herself in the Achy Breaky Heart singer, it is her mum who is her “hero”.
Asked to compare how her parents contributed to her successes today, Miley stressed they were “different” and “can’t be weighed on the same scale, actually”.
She explained: “Without my dad, I know — I mean, not just literally I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair, I wouldn’t exist — but I would not, who I am as a person, it wouldn’t exist.
Miley with her dad Billy Ray and her mother Tish. Photo / Instagram
“Because my dad, as a creative and as an artist in the way that his brain works, has always made me feel safer in my own mind because we’re very similar in our ideas.
“So I think a lot of his perspective on reality and on life, I’ve inherited from him, more so than the way that I was raised — which really, my mom raised me.
