Billy Ray Cyrus has opened up about a near-fatal health battle in 2024 that left him fighting for his life, and has credited his daughter Noah and a five-year-old grandson with helping pull him through.
Speaking to PEOPLEin an interview published on Wednesday, the 64-year-old singer revealed he contracted sepsis and came dangerously close to dying.
“I got really sick and almost died,” he said, recalling a period in which his body was dealing with a severe toxic reaction.
“My body was blowing up with a toxicity of some type. If it had erupted, I would have died.”
After being sent home from hospital, Cyrus said he would visit a “prayer rock” multiple times each day, asking for a miracle.
That moment came when doctors prepared for one final surgery. “I got to the hospital and they said, ‘Mr. Cyrus, it’s gone. It’s healed.’ I had a miracle,” he said.
The illness also caused vocal paralysis, leaving him unable to sing or speak, a devastating blow for a man whose identity is so bound up in music.
But he leaned on faith and, unexpectedly, on his daughter Noah’s 2025 song Don’t Put It All On Me, written by his son Braison.
“I just loved it so much,” he said. “And I do credit that particular song saving me.”
He described listening to it throughout the day in search of “a little bit of peace,” and said believing in his own recovery became easier once he had experienced what he considered a miracle.
“Cyrus, you can’t talk or sing right now, but believe you can,” he told himself.
Perhaps the most moving moment in his recovery came from an unexpected source, Braison’s five-year-old son Bear, who looked at his grandfather during what Cyrus described as “a very broken moment” and said simply: “Try again.”
The detail that makes it all the more extraordinary is that Bear had never spoken to him before.
“I wasn’t even sure if he knew my name,” Cyrus said. “I thought, ‘He’s telling you something.’ Somehow, I got to try again at both. So I’m learning to try again.”
Cyrus’s new album The Hillis due for release on 16 June. He shares Noah and Braison, as well as daughter Miley, with his ex-wife Tish Cyrus, to whom he was married from 1993 to 2022.
2026-06-11 07:12:00
