Dolly Parton’s last recording is a duet with Bono, out today on U2’s new album. He remembers the woman who brought him the song, even recalling her punchline about ‘Jolene’.
‘What a gift she gave us and what a blessing it felt like’, Bono told The Sun. ‘And I’m like you … I can hardly listen to that voice now’, he added.
Bono’s interview comes on the heels of Dolly Parton’s last song, ‘Torn’, which was recorded in Nashville in June — weeks before her death on 25 August — and released on Friday, 13 November. The Parton-Bono duet closes Carnaval De Luz.
Bono recalled approaching Parton with some music he thought she might like. She had an unfinished song of her own, about a woman struggling to choose between two lovers, and invited him to take it «in a different direction».
Dolly Parton left us a gift. Eight weeks before she died, she recorded this song with Bono. #torn https://t.co/ukPjYshE5l
— RockyRoadPatriot (@RockyRd_Patriot) November 12, 2026
In the finished duet, two brothers sit at a kitchen table, divided by politics and barely able to speak. Bono told The Sun that two of Parton’s own brothers had stopped speaking to each other over politics.
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The Dolly Parton Bono remembers
«Dolly is the Queen of the Carnival. She’s the definition of it,» Bono said. «She came from a one-room cabin on Locust Ridge Road (in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee) and real poverty, and she reminded us all that where you come from MUST not decide where you’re going in life.»
«I think what we loved about her was the lack of self-pity,» he said. «Years after she wrote about Jolene running off with her man, somebody asked her, ‘How do you feel about that song now?’»
Bono remembered her answer. «When I look over and I see my man sleeping and catching flies out there on the porch, I think, ‘Come back Jolene and take him away!’»
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How ‘Torn’ reached listeners
Parton shares the writing credit with U2 and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid. Bono described Larry Mullen Jr‘s drumming as creating a «sci-fi country landscape» and said Parton liked where the band took the song. Hearing her voice on a U2 record, he said, was «a bit of a shock, but a welcome one.»
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There are two ways to hear her final vocal. The album version arrived on 13 November. A separate country mix, the Kent Wells Version, premiered on US country radio the day before. Daniel Lanois plays pedal steel.
