Review Summary: I hold the hope and the hope holds me
Sometimes, a classic album comes from the most unexpected source. Noah – famously of the star-studded Cyrus family – has been crafting music in the shadow of her father and older sister since she was sixteen, trying her hand at several styles while employing a variety of collaborators ranging from XXXtentacion to Death Cab for Cutie. It’s not easy growing up under pop royalty, but she used her earliest days of songwriting to experiment with what worked for her, and perhaps more importantly, what didn’t. Her debut LP
The Hardest Part was a crucially important release for Noah, because it was the moment in which she finally found her footing and put an end to the careening and ever-elusive search for a true identity. If her 2022 debut saw her landing on solid ground, then
I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me sees her emphatically planting a flag. With her sophomore full-length release, there is no longer any question as to who Noah Cyrus
is. She easily has the most beautiful voice in her family. She is very much
not a pop star, and it serves to her undeniable benefit. Noah is the kind of true folk/Americana artist who can steal the show with the sheer power and haunting beauty of her voice alone.
I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me is a showcase of that stunning voice, wrapped in a beautiful atmosphere that is akin to sitting on a moonlit hill on a summer night watching the fog wisp around the tree tops. It’s the kind of experience that is nearly impossible to resist, and once heard, even harder to forget.
I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me opens the curtains with what might be Cyrus’ best song to date, the celestial ‘I Saw The Mountains’. The song glides over gentle acoustic strums that feel like blades of grass shuffling in the breeze, and are eventually joined by subtle strings buzzing like fireflies in the night sky. It finally swells with a gentle rumble of percussion which elevates the song to its breathtaking chorus, where Noah delivers her most self-assured performance to date – a dreamy, sedated siren song that calls from the depths of this magical forest she crafted. She sings of being one with her surroundings, and finding peace in it: “I saw the mountains and they saw me / Seen too many things that I just can't unsee / But I hold the hope and the hope holds me.” In the refrain, she concludes, “When you feel alone in the dark, I am wherever you are.” Right off the bat, the album presents itself with an aura of unifying grace and tranquility.
The embrace only grows warmer as
I Want My Loved Ones further unfolds, with the piano-underscored ‘Don’t Put It All On Me’ excavating the roots of a slowly dying relationship with perhaps more elegance (and eloquence) than I’ve heard from any artist in years: “By the look in your eye, I can tell that you no longer need me / The feeling is freeing / Don't put it all on me.” Noah’s voice gorgeously tangles with Robin Pecknold’s (of Fleet Foxes), as the poetry of the moment envelops their voices and carries them off toward a horizon filled with pain, certainly, but also mutual acknowledgment of fault – and the shared carrying of emotional weight that comes with it.
I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me is an album that seemingly takes the simplest of observations and transforms them into probing questions. As the record rounds the corner into ‘What’s It All For’, Noah sings of trying to locate her purpose in life and walks through all the phases of her hypothetical life: “How can you love someone till you don't anymore? / Why have a family if that ain't what you want? / Why have a child you don't know how to love? / You stand at the gates at the end of your time / And stretched out before you are scenes from your life / All that sweet, simple pain, and the cold, bitter joy / Oh, if that's all there is, then what's it all for?” At the end of her somber ruminations, guided by little more than the tender plucks of her guitar and a compassionate viola, you can feel the once effervescent glow of youthful wonder dim to the sad, jaded realization that our existence in this world isn’t what we were promised as children: “What's it all for? / If I ever knew / Well, I don't anymore.”
Loss of innocence isn’t localized to ‘What’s It All For’. On the heartbreaking ‘Way of the World’, Cyrus sings about how the world is set up to corrupt our inherent trust from birth: “The first thing you learn is grieving and loss / Cause you can't return to the safe place you lost / From your mother's womb, into the chaos of a cold hospital room.” Unchangeable facts of life aside, she begins to question other aspects of our societal fabric over a pop-country beat that belies the sadness of the topics at-hand: “They send you to church and they drop you at school / And your little heart breaks as you're watching them both drive away / And I cried on the side of the curb / Yeah, the panic set in, and it hurt / Oh, but that's just the way that it works, the way of the world.” On the stunning ‘Apple Tree’, we seem to get that song’s reflection from the perspective of a heartbroken adult enduring an excruciating separation: “Oh, love ruins everything / Busted to pieces, now what do I do? / Often my thoughts turn back to days of childhood / We used to gather around the fireside and the soft light fell on little faces fair / And we'd laugh and play and love each other / Our hearts were young and free from all care / And at night, we'd say our
now I lay me’s / And Mom, she'd sweetly tuck us all in bed / Yes, I wanna be with that happy family.” Noah’s voice sounds spectral above the forsaken ambience of a solitary classical piano, and you can almost feel her soul voluntarily leaving her body for the warm embrace of the best and purest love she’s ever known – a distant memory in the wake of the poignant sorrow at-hand.
While often written from the steady hand of personal experience, growing pains are also observed and acknowledged as a universal truth. On ‘Man In The Field’, Cyrus sings of someone she once knew and trusted with her life, and how he became a person that she no longer recognizes: “There's a man in the field, I once knew him close / But now I only feel the chill of his ghost.” At the heart of her resentment, however, is a glimmer of hope – this feeling that deep down, the man she once knew might still be wandering…somewhere: “If you listen close, to the song of the wind / He's singing with the hills / I know he's there still.” Cyrus is perhaps at her most captivating as a songwriter on the eerie ‘Long Ride Home’. Her airy, whispered vocals echo with an icy distance that parallels a lyrical narrative about a couple who are drifting away from each other, following an argument in the car: “As we driving 'cross the Vincent Thomas Bridge, saying / "Reach across and grab the wheel, and drive this car the way you feel" / God, I hope this is the bottom, but I fear that there's nothing to push off from way down here / Your lips are blue and body's still / I'd save us if I had the will.” The song erupts into (perhaps unanticipated) splendor across its back half, as Noah comes to the realization that their relationship has completely died and they are essentially ghosts at the wheel: “LA Harbor looks so peaceful after dark / And the weight of the Pacific's on my heart / Scared that we might spend forever in this car, two bodies cold and all alone / I think the wheels have left the road." On
I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me, Cyrus consistently takes instances of loss – either her own, or someone else’s – and places them in the most symbolic and metaphorically beautiful light possible. It’s vivid and entirely gripping; in a way Noah’s never been until this album.
Everything on
I Want My Loved Ones To Go With Me is delivered with cleverness and jaw-dropping aesthetic. Even on the record’s closest brush with contemporary country-pop (the Blake Shelton featured ‘New Country’), Noah cool-handedly sidesteps the genre’s common pitfalls by keeping it simple and centering the song around her mesmerizing voice, as well as the occasional beauty that spawns from their layered vocal harmonies. Where perceived weaknesses exist – and may have caused the album to show its cracks in less capable hands – Noah serves as the glue holding the experience together. Elsewhere, Cyrus harkens back to her childhood once more with an ode to her father's song ‘With You’, and she again navigates love as a metaphor in nature on the penultimate ‘Love Is A Canyon’ (“Love is a canyon / It's beautifully true / Empty and abandoned, would you look at the view / Love is a canyon that I keep on falling into"). The album’s final song, featuring Bill Callahan, sends the whole thing off with a rustic, outlaw country vibe (replete with spoken verses) as the two writers intertwine to gaze into the meaning of it all and come away with…just…love. It almost feels like an answer to Noah’s desperate pleas on ‘What’s It All For?”, because in the absence of divine purpose, it’s all we really have. “I don't contain multitudes, I can barely contain anything / Can't contain my love, but why would I want to?”, they sing, as the album fades into the ether. It's a befitting and uplifting conclusion to an album spent searching for a silver lining of any kind.
Noah entered the writing process with the intention of creating something
timeless. Even on the heels of a fairly promising debut in
The Hardest Part, this release blows any and all expectations out of the water.
I Want My Loved Ones to Go With Me is more mature, confident, and consistent with regard to vocal performance, atmosphere, songwriting, and production. It’s stately and wise beyond Noah’s years, and more lyrically skilled than anything that (any) Cyrus has conjured up prior. This is pure, brilliant folk music for anyone seeking an escape in 2025. With Noah achieving her goal from the very outset, it seems that this music will be capable of transporting listeners for
many more years to come.
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