The final vocal recording of Dolly Parton’s seven-decade career appears on U2’s new album, Nov. 13’s Carnaval de Luz, the band announced today. Parton, who died in August at age 80, recorded her duet with Bono on the album-closing track, “Torn,” in June.
She shares writing credits for the song with the band and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid. “When she got ill,” Bono tells Rolling Stone in interviews for an upcoming feature, “she got out of her bed to sing this song. And you can hear that. And I can’t even listen to it now.”
Bono initially pursued Parton as a collaborator for a still-unreleased side project inspired by Irish folk music, and played her a few sketches over the phone. “She said, ‘That’s a little too Irish for me,'” Bono recalls. “But she said, ‘I got this song. It’s called “Torn,” and do you wanna see where you can take it somewhere else, maybe?'”
Bono and McDaid rewrote the lyrics around a mother watching her family split apart, and Parton agreed to sing that version. “She sang her heart out,” says Bono, “and I cannot believe that’s an 80-year-old woman.” Longtime U2 collaborator Daniel Lanois plays pedal steel on the track, and Larry Mullen Jr. added a drum part inspired by a Lanois production, Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time.”
Parton was able to approve the final mix. “Dolly loved it,” says the album’s producer, Garret “Jacknife” Lee. “She was so proud of her vocal and the recording. She was thrilled with it. We were very nervous that she might not approve, or would be uncomfortable with it, but she loved it.”
For Bono, the loss is still settling in. “It’s very moving to have had these intimacies with such a figure,” he says. “The fact that they’re not there now, in any way you can call back, other than through her songs, is very sobering.”
Another posthumous track by Parton, the just-released Stanley Brothers tribute“Bound to Ride,” was recorded much earlier, circa 2022.
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