Miley Cyrus has insisted she has “a lot of love” for her father, Billy Ray Cyrus, and denied they were estranged.
The “Flowers” hitmaker and her siblings have appeared to have divided loyalties towards their parents since they divorced two years ago, but the 31-year-old singer has dismissed suggestions of a rift.
She said her relationship with her dad was different to the one she had with her mom, Tish.
During an appearance on “My Next Guest Needs No Introduction with David Letterman”, she was asked about her relationship with her parents, with the host saying: “Is it unlikely that both parents would share an equal role going through your life, where it’s always going to be one or the other is closer as things evolve.”
She replied: “It’s really just not the closeness. I think it’s the capacity in which my mom was raised by a completely intact, beautiful family. Actually, my mom was adopted, so my mom was chosen.
“Her parents couldn’t have children, so they wanted her more than anything in the world. So, my mom came in to this world being wanted and being loved and being given the most beautiful life.
“My grandmother spoilt not only her … (and) me completely rotten. My dad didn’t have that.
“The way my dad was raised, he grew up very poor in a very small town. His parents were divorced when he was very young.
“My dad had a pretty rough childhood and my childhood, really, I mean, we can go on and talk about the hard times and the struggles; you know, turning in my homework and learning my lines was tough but I had food, I had love, I grew up in a beautiful big house.
“And my dad didn’t have that. So I have a lot of empathy and compassion for his childhood, which obviously developed to create the man he is now that I have a lot of love for.”
Letterman then asked: “There’s not estrangement here with your father, it’s just the way things are played?”
The musician confirmed: “Yeah. I think, what is so beautiful is that my parents, they served their children, and I know this. My parents served us and sacrificed so much for us. Anything we dreamt of, they made possible.”
The former “Hannah Montana” star said she “inherited the narcissism from my father”, and while she sees a lot of herself in the “Achy Breaky Heart” singer, her mom was her hero.
Asked to compare how her parents contributed to her success, she said they were different and “can’t be weighed on the same scale”.
“Without my dad, I know, I mean not just literally, ”I wouldn’t be sitting in this chair, I wouldn’t exist … Who I am as a person, it wouldn’t exist.
“Because my dad, as a creative and as an artist in the way that his brain works, has always made me feel safer in my own mind because we’re very similar in our ideas.
“So, I think a lot of his perspective on reality and on life, I’ve inherited from him, more so than the way that I was raised, which really, my mom raised me.
“Honestly, my mom is my hero.”