In life, Dolly Parton always looked for ways to bring people together. In death, it seems, her work carries on. The members of U2 sat on the Jimmy Kimmel Live! couch on Thursday night (Nov. 12) to discuss their new album, Carnaval de Luz, whose final track, “Torn,” features the last-ever vocals recorded by Parton, who died at 80 on Aug. 25 after a brief battle with cancer.
“Is there anyone else that the whole world is going to agree upon other than Dolly?,” Bono said about the universal outpouring of love and devotion that followed Parton’s passing earlier this year. “Dolly Parton is a mythical figure who actually existed recently,” he continued. “And our hearts are broken by this, but we are also blessed to be given her last vocal.”
Bono said the group very much wanted to work with Parton and they pitched her a few ideas, including a kind of “folky” thing called “Lifelong” that he described as a “dizzy, drunken marriage song.” Dipping into his best/worst Tennessee accent, Bono said Parton told the group that it was perhaps, “‘a little too Irish for me if that’s okay.’”
Instead, Parton said she had a song she’d started and was happy to let U2 tinker, adding that she was excited to see where they’d take it. “The implication here, of course, is, ‘if I don’t like where you take it, it will never see the light of day,’” Bono said of Parton’s thrown gauntlet. Guitarist The Edge said it was a “real shock” that Parton was willing to put her musical destiny in their hands because they were aiming for something kind of “sci-fi country” and she was really game to play along.
In the end, Bono called the experience a master class, recalling being blown away by Parton’s range as she “sang herself to some other place” on the tune. “We are told that she did not know that she was that ill. But it’s her last prayer in a way … was this song,” Bono said. “It feels like a prayer, and I think it’s for America, but I think it’s for anywhere where there’s a divided politics.”
The meditative track opens with Parton’s plaintive vocals as she wonders, “What am I supposed to do?/ And how am I supposed to choose?/ I love them both and I just feel so torn.”
The lines are prophetic, Bono said, predicting that there will be plenty of loud conversations and possible shouting matches at the Thanksgiving table this year after a bitter midterm campaign season. He noted that Parton has a line in the song that goes, “Nothing hurts a mother more than a family at war,” which perfectly sums up the anxiety of the times we’re living in.
“She didn’t have kids. We are all, especially ‘Mericans, you are the children of Dolly Parton,” the singer added to laughs from the studio audience. “And it is her prayer that you reach across the table and find common purpose.”
The band released a lyric video for the song on Friday (Nov. 13) featuring still images of Parton mixed in with footage of Nashville and the countryside. Bono explained that since they couldn’t make a video with the ailing Parton, they decided to take a page from the estate of Johnny Cash, which released a crowdsourced posthumous video for the song “Ain’t No Grave” in 2010 that featured contributions from more than 250,000 fans in 172 countries.
He said, like the Cash estate did for Cash’s final video, the Parton estate gave U2 permission to do the same, encouraging fans to go here to make their contributions. The band is inviting fans to draw, decorate, graffiti or otherwise embellish the baseline video with messages of love or memories of the “Jolene” singer. “This will keep going, so we could be here in a year and the video that’s out in a week or two will just be the start of it. It will be an infinite testament to her,” said Bono of the ongoing project.
Watch the “Torn” lyric video and U2 discuss working with Parton on Kimmel below.
