Cyrus coming to area for concert, album signing

There’s only one way to celebrate the release of a CD called “Home At Last.” Gas up the tour bus and high-tail it back to see mom and them.

Flatwoods, Ky., native music artist Billy Ray Cyrus will release his new Walt Disney Records CD, “Home at Last” on Tuesday. He will come home to share this new batch of songs live in concert at 8 p.m. Tuesday, July 31, at the historic Paramount Arts Center in Ashland, Ky., where he filmed the video to his mega hit, “Achy Breaky Heart.”

Tickets for the concert, presented by WTCR-FM, 103.3, go on sale Monday at the Paramount and on Ticketmaster.

Tickets are $25, $20, $50 (limited number of gold circle seats).

Cyrus, who has stayed in the spotlight on the hit Disney Channel series, “Hannah Montana,” (starring his 14 year-old daughter Miley Cyrus) and the ABC competition “Dancing With the Stars,” has been working on the CD for a while, in between taping those shows.

Cyrus, who took off four months from the CD to try “Dancing With the Stars,” will also do an album signing at 5 p.m. Tuesday, July 31, at the Wal-Mart, 351 River Hill Road, Ashland, Ky. (off of US 23 ).

Opening the concert will be fellow Eastern Kentucky native, Julie Reeves, the former Virgin Records recording artist whose song, “Trouble Is A Woman,” was covered on this year’s American Idol show.

Cyrus, whose 1992 debut, “Some Gave All” sold nine million copies and topped the pop charts for a record-smashing 17 weeks, last played — and sold out — the Paramount in June 2005.

“Our listeners have asked us time and time again when is Billy coming back home,” said Judy Cornett, vice president/market manager for Clear Channel Radio. “This was just a great opportunity to let the fans hear the new music live, and I am sure a few of their favorite Billy Ray tunes will be rocking the Paramount Arts Center. ‘Achy Breaky’ was filmed there, so it is a lucky place for Billy Ray to showcase his new music.”

Cornett said this is a very special concert since he is not really “on tour” until October, but was coming through, and decided to do the concert even though there’s only just over a week to sell tickets.

“We’re very happy to get it,” Cornett said. “Now, we’ve got eight days to sell it out.”

Some of the songs Cyrus will be singing come from his 10th CD, “Home At Last” was half cut in Nashville and half in L.A. It features the many sides of Cyrus, who is a little bit country, Southern-fried rock’n’ roll and gospel.

Cornett said the CD shows a Billy Ray whose voice has matured with a better richness to it, and some great song choices that are added to his originals.

“One of my greatest pet peeves is when people introduce me as ‘country music artist Billy Ray Cyrus’,” he said in a release. “I am a country music artist, but I’m also a blues singer, a Southern rock and roll singer, a bluegrass singer and a gospel singer. This album is a unique combination of musical styles through me, my producer and all of these world-class musicians.”

The first single from the CD, “Ready, Set … Don’t Go,” sparked writers from “Hannah Montana” to write a show based around the song, and caused record producer Fred Mollin and Walt Disney Records to work on making it the cornerstone for an album based on sentiments every wife would want to hear her husband say, and every child would want to hear its father say.

The CD features many tunes written by Cyrus including thoughts on the passing of time (”Flying By”) and a stand-by-your-man kind of a song, (”Don’t Give Up On Me”) as well as “Can’t Live Without Your Love” and “My Everything,” the latter of which Billy Ray wrote the same week as “Ready, Set … Don’t Go.”

Cyrus also carries the strong influence of the Tri-State and wrote “The Buffalo” about the American dilemma of major businesses moving operations to foreign lands or closing altogether, leaving entire towns devoid of steady jobs.

“Where I come from in Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia and Ohio, we’ve seen it happen for years in the steel mills and the coal mines,” he said. “People suddenly are forced to find a whole new way to make a living. I’ve had that song for about six years, but never the right album for it. It’s about the fortitude a father needs to instill in his children to never give up.”

Cyrus tops off the CD with four pop classics including a rousing rendition of Van Morrison’s “Brown-Eyed Girl” (which he brought the house down with at the Country Music Association Festival), the James Taylor smash “You’ve Got a Friend” (featuring Hannah Montana co-star Emily Osment), and the family of man standard “Put a Little Love in Your Heart.”

There is also a strings-kissed reading of the eternally hopeful “Over the Rainbow.”

“This was one of the first songs the folks at Disney strongly suggested I record,” Cyrus said. “The producer of ‘Hannah Montana,’ Michael Poryes, heard me mulling it over and asked if I’d ever heard Eva Cassidy sing it. He burned me a copy, and I fell in love with her right there. I was intrigued by her story — a woman who stood staunchly behind the integrity of her craft to the very end. My version is a tribute to a great singer who left this world too soon.”