Country music legend Dolly Parton was never a stranger to collaboration. While songwriting sessions with Linda Ronstadt and Kenny Rogers are classic examples of more predictable team-ups, she was always happy to go a little off-piste, too, as her 2025 collaboration with Mötley Crüe attests.
However, it was Irish rockers U2 who got the honor of recording Parton’s last-ever song with her, and Bono says her passing has now made it too painful to listen to.
The Irish band have sold an estimated 175 million records during their career. They’ll be looking to give that figure a shot in the arm when they release Carnaval de Luz, their first album in over a decade, this November. But following Parton’s passing at 80 last month, one song from the new batch is getting more attention than most.
“When she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing this song,” Bono tells Rolling Stone of “Torn,” a song that Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid also helped write.
“And you can hear that,” he adds. “I can’t even listen to it now.”
The track will close the band’s first full-length record of new music since Songs of Experience in 2014. Mind you, the band has already released two EPs — Days of Ash and Easter Lily — this year. They’re dead center in a purple patch right now.
Like many U2 songs before it, the original idea for their duet drew influence from Irish folk music. Parton wasn’t overly fond of the suggested sketch, with Bono saying she quipped, “That’s a little too Irish for me,” when it was first presented to her. In classic Parton fashion, the tireless songstress had a backup plan in her back pocket.
“She said, ‘I got this song. It’s called ‘Torn’; do you wanna see where you can take it somewhere else, maybe?’” he recalls.
Details about the song are still closely guarded at this point, but it has been revealed that Daniel Lanois, who has worked with U2 before as well as the likes of Neil Young, Peter Gabriel and Willie Nelson, plays pedal steel on the track. It’s a hire that ensures the signature Parton flavor comes from more than just her belted vocals.
An official press release from the band, meanwhile, describes “Torn” as “a tender country song detailing broken family ties, that holds wider resonances.”
Not only is it another unlikely collaboration from an artist who remained unpredictable and vivacious until the very end, it feels like a dream for Bono that it even happened.
“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.”
The news comes as Parton’s estate deals with an increasingly complicated aftermath of her death. On September 23, a Tennessee judge granted a temporary restraining order against her nephew Bryan Seaver and his security company, following allegations from Parton’s estate that he had made threatening statements toward employees, attorneys and business partners. Seaver, who served as Parton’s head of security and announced her death last month, has denied making threats and called the restraining order a “publicity stunt.”
Parton was laid to rest at a private Nashville ceremony at the end of August, and was the subject of a teary tribute at the Emmys just two weeks later.
Her career would begin with just one little guitar, and would go on to span a staggering eight decades. During that time, she released 49 studio albums, with her last, Rockstar, showing another side to the singer once more.
It was an album that Steve Albini had wanted to produce before his passing, but it was U2 who got the honor of one last studio trip with the Queen of Country.
