Dolly Parton Sings on Posthumous U2 Collaboration ‘Torn’

U2 released “Torn,” a posthumous collaboration with Dolly Parton featuring her last recorded vocal performance, at midnight.

The duet between Parton and U2 frontman Bono closes Carnaval De Luz, the Irish rock band’s 16th and latest studio album. The title translates to “Carnival of Light.”

U2, Parton and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid co-wrote “Torn.” The song connects the full 24-track deluxe version of the project, followed in sequence by the surprise-release EPs Days of Ash and Easter Lily, as a double album.

“You sense a border crossing,” Bono said in a statement. “And so you move from the south into the north, and you have Dolly Parton singing to you as you cross the border.”

Carnaval De Luz is U2’s first album of new material in nine years. Island Records also released several versions of “Torn,” including the “Kent Wells Version” and the “T Bone Burnett Take,” all featuring Parton.

Before the release, Bono told Rolling Stone that the recording was difficult for him to hear.

“When she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing this song,” Bono said. “And you can hear that. And I can’t even listen to it now.”

Parton recorded her vocals in June, two months before her death. “She sang her heart out,” Bono told Rolling Stone, “and I cannot believe that’s an 80-year-old woman.”

Parton approved the final mix before she died on Aug. 25 at age 80, following a brief battle with cancer.

“It’s very moving to have had these intimacies with such a figure,” Bono told Rolling Stone. “The fact that they’re not there now, in any way you can call back, other than through her songs, is very sobering.”

Carnaval De Luz arrives 50 years after drummer Larry Mullen Jr. pinned a handwritten notice to the message board at Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin: “Drummer Seeks Musicians To Form Band.”

U2, whose members are Bono, The Edge, Mullen and Adam Clayton, has sold 175 million albums, according to Island Records, and won 22 Grammy Awards. The band has placed 34 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, including two No. 1s, and earned eight No. 1 albums on the Billboard 200. U2 was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2005.

U2 was the first band to play the Sphere in Las Vegas, opening the venue in September 2023 with the residency U2:UV Achtung Baby Live at Sphere.

According to the band’s representatives, U2 is working on plans to bring the new album to the stage for Carnaval De Luz presents: The Greatest Show On Earth World Tour, a live tour in 2027.

Source: Billboard