Why Noah Cyrus Says It Was ‘Hard’ to Find Her Own Voice Making Music at First — and What Dad Billy Ray Told Her (Exclusive)

Noah Cyrus is charting her own course in country music.

Of course, finding one’s own voice when coming from a musical dynasty can be a daunting task.

“It was hard for me as a kid to trust in myself and my own identity and feel like that was enough,” Cyrus, 25, tells PEOPLE of making a name for herself, “but it is something that I think you just grow out of, and you grow with confidence. [Self-doubt] was something that I felt was put on me, that I then adopted and put on myself.”

For more on Noah Cyrus, subscribe now to PEOPLE, or pick up this week’s issue, on newsstands Friday.

After playing with experimental pop in her teens, Cyrus eventually returned to her family’s sonic roots, infusing the Nashville storytelling she has running through her veins on her 2020 EP The End of Everything (standout “July” helped earn her a 2021 best new artist Grammy nomination) then her 2022 debut album, The Hardest Part. Meanwhile, on her new album, I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me, she deftly deftly weaved country, folk and Americana into a sound all her own.

Along the way, Cyrus got some advice from her father, “Achy Breaky Heart” singer Billy Ray Cyrus, 63.

He told her “to be the outlaw, whatever that means to you, whether it’s thinking there’s no box and not making the music that people expect you to make and making the decisions that people say are right,” Cyrus says, “or just living by your own rules like Waylon [Jennings] and Johnny [Cash].”

On her recent single “New Country,” Cyrus sings of that inner turmoil she has felt when she was finding her place in the music industry: “To know where you are going when you don’t know where you are / All these eyes on you / Waiting on you to fall / ’Cause the box they put you in, just don’t fit you anymore.”

Cyrus tapped country superstar Blake Shelton as a duet partner for “New Country,” who sees firsthand the singular career Noah is creating for herself.

“I know she’s got the talent and determination,” Shelton tells People, “to step out and create her own legacy. I really am a big Noah fan — the person and the artist. I’ve got a lot of great history with the Cyrus family, and I’m thrilled to build on that, getting to work with Noah.”

Indeed, Cyrus arrived with the July release of the acclaimed I Want My Loved Ones to Go with Me, which she’ll tour this fall.

“A lot of my career has been the journey of finding myself again. Now I know my sense of self, and I know what I want to write about and who I want to connect to. I’m at a place in my life where I don’t think that people really know this part of who I am, because there have been so many different variations of myself ’cause I was just growing up, and I was changing,” Cyrus says. “But I made it out on a really positive side of, I think, a really dark time that I was going through.”