Billy Ray Cyrus Defends Daughter Miley Cyrus: ‘Reinvention Is Tough’

Billy Ray Cyrus is defending his daughter, following her recent headline-making MTV Video Music Awards performance and “Wrecking Ball” video.

The pop star’s dad said his daughter is trying to reinvent herself.

“Miley is a very, very smart young lady,” Billy Ray said on Thursday night’s “Piers Morgan Live.” “Reinvention is tough. It’s that intangible. You either find it or you don’t, and sometimes it takes that evolution.”

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Billy Ray said his daughter is a risk taker because she is an artist.

“For me to think how hard she’s worked to get to this point and what a risk — just the fact that she went and cut her hair off? That was huge. She could have stayed Hannah Montana forever and made a great living doing that, but she’s more of an artist than that and she wanted to evolve and she had to take her time and let that evolution take place,” he said. “And again, she’s very, very smart and had all of this thought out in advance.”

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The singer said his daughter knew she needed something big to make the transition from her squeaky clean Disney image.

“Miley has been around a lot of the greats like Dolly who have [gone] through that continual process of reinvention,” he said. “Miley’s smart enough to know that to come out of the shadows of Hannah Montana, it really takes something extremely drastic, which, when you go to that level, it creates passion, and passion is either love or hate, but there’s no middle of the road for passion.”

Billy Ray said Miley knows what she’s doing.

“She knows the charts, she set a path, she knew what she wanted to do,” he told Piers. “In today’s world, the shock factor is tremendously higher than it used to be.”

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Asked if his daughter has any regrets or if she’s just loving it all, Billy Ray said Miley hasn’t had a moment to reflect on any of it.

“She’s been so busy. Every single night she’s in the studio. She’s writing, she’s creating, she’s rehearsing for this big show up in Vegas. It’s been so great,” he added.

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