By Silke Sullivan
Los Angeles, California – Though Dolly Parton died in August, the country music queen’s distinctive voice appears on a world-renowned rock band’s new album.
The 16th studio album by U2 and the band’s first release of new material in nine years, Carnaval De Luz, is set to arrive on November 13, and it includes a Parton-sized surprise.
Parton, who died in August at the age of 80, recorded the duet for the closing track, Torn, with U2 frontman Bono in June, per reports by Rolling Stone.
Universal Music says it is Parton’s last recorded vocal performance.
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The song, cowritten by U2, Parton, and Johnny McDaid of Snow Patrol, is described as a moving country ballad about broken family relationships whose significance reaches far beyond that.
“When she got ill,” Bono told Rolling Stone, “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 tried to recruit Parton for an as‑yet‑unreleased project that was inspired by Irish folk music. He played her a few sketches over the phone: “She said, ‘That’s a little too Irish for me,'” Bono recalled.
“But she said, ‘I got this song. It’s called Torn, and do you wanna see where you can take it somewhere else, maybe?'”
He worked on it with McDaid, and Parton agreed to record that version. “She sang her heart out,” Bono recalled, “and I cannot believe that’s an 80-year-old woman.”
Her death makes the U2 frontman realize just how irreplaceable that encounter was. “It’s very moving to have had these intimacies with such a figure,” he said.
“The fact that they’re not there now, in any way you can call back, other than through her songs, is very sobering.”
