Bono says Dolly Parton got off bed rest to record her final song with U2: ‘I can’t even listen to it now’
Bono says Dolly Parton got off bed rest to record her final song with U2: ‘I can’t even listen to it now’
Leigh BlickleyThu, September 24, 2026 at 7:41 PM UTC
2
Bono; Dolly PartonCredit: Lionel Hahn/Getty; Axelle/Bauer-Griffin/FilmMagicKey Points -
Bono recalls working with Dolly Parton on her final vocal recording, “Torn.”
The song is off his band U2’s new album, Carnaval De Luz.
Bono says Parton got off bed rest to record the song, and “you can hear that.”
Bono is grateful Dolly Parton was able to record her final song with him, just two months before her death.
Parton, who died at 80 on Aug. 25 after a brief battle with cancer, is featured on U2’s track “Torn,” which will appear on the Irish band’s new album, Carnaval De Luz. She recorded her vocals for the song in June.
According to a press release shared Thursday, the duet with Bono is “a tender country song detailing broken family ties that holds wider resonances.” Parton co-wrote the track with U2 and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid.
“When she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing this song,” Bono told Rolling Stone of what turned out to be Parton’s final vocal recording. “And you can hear that. And I can’t even listen to it now.”
Bono told the outlet that he wanted to collaborate on another album with Parton, but that she was worried it was “a little too Irish for me.”
“But,” he noted, “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 reportedly rewrote the lyrics around a mother who watches her family split up, and Parton agreed to sing on that version.
“She sang her heart out,” Bono recalled, “and I cannot believe that’s an 80-year-old woman.”
Parton was even able to hear the song and approve the final mix, which features Daniel Lanois on pedal steel and Larry Mullen Jr. playing a drum part inspired by Bob Dylan’s “Most of the Time.”
“Dolly loved it,” the album’s producer, Garret “Jacknife” Lee, told Rolling Stone. “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.”
Advertisement
Dolly Parton performing in 2022Credit: Kevin Mazur/Getty
Of getting to work with Parton before her death, Bono said the experience is not something he takes lightly.
“It’s very moving to have had these intimacies with such a figure,” he told the outlet. “The fact that they’re not there now, in any way you can call back, other than through her songs, is very sobering.”
Following news of Parton’s death last month, Bono shared a sketch of the Queen of Country over words he had wrote. “Every heart is torn,” he captioned the moving image on Instagram.
Get your daily dose of entertainment news, celebrity updates, and what to watch with our EW Dispatch newsletter.
Bono recently suffered another loss after his friend and fellow Irish musician, Glen Hansard, died in a motorcycle accident on July 29. He was 56.
Bono delivered an emotional tribute to the late singer-songwriter at his funeral on Aug. 4 in Dublin, performing a spoken-word rendition of U2’s “Beautiful Day” alongside the band’s guitarist The Edge.
“Voice of the streets. A choir of angels in one man. The rest of us blessed to stand there beside our very own and very earthed Angel Gabriel… All of us welcome in his choir, whatever shape or form,” Bono wrote on U2’s Instagram of Hansard, best known for his work in Once.
“I’m telling myself this morning that if he never existed, then he can never cease to exist. For me, he will always be everywhere I see a coin spinning into an open guitar case. May you rest in the peace you gave to so many,” he concluded.
Carnaval De Luz, the 16th studio album from U2, is out on Nov. 13.
on Entertainment Weekly
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
