"It's interesting you call it a song," Billy Ray tells Taste of Country, "but quite frankly, it's a prayer." He's right. The nearly nine-minute-long closing track on his new Thin Line album (out Sept. 9) is more of a seance than anything country fans can find on the radio. The two vocalists trade improvisations over a guitar and a ... actually, what is that?

The high-pitched drone you hear throughout is what inspired the song. Miley gave Billy Ray a Tibetan singing bowl for his birthday this year, and he started playing with it while in California. He created a track, and the next day, his 23-year-old pop star daughter stopped by and laid down improvised vocals.

“What she says is what was coming to her mind at the moment," Cyrus shares. It's a mix of back-and-forth conversation and ambient singing about the destruction of the earth and other manmade maladies. Somehow, the song remains hopeful — that probably has more to do with the bowl than the lyrical content, but it's difficult to say, as the vocals are at best, buried.

"I never had a bowl like that," Billy Ray Cyrus says, "that you hit with a drum stick and it reverberates and it makes that sound. That whole humming sound is one bowl."

It's a fine, if unusual, coda to an album that more or less plays it straight with a mix of country and rock. Aeorsmith's Joe Perry and singer Shooter Jennings also make appearances on Thin Line. Several songs pay tribute to legendary country singers.

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