Dolly Parton's last recorded vocal closes U2's new album, Carnaval de Luz
U2 will release Carnaval de Luz, their first album of new songs since 2017, on November 13, 2026. It closes on "Torn", a duet with Dolly Parton built from a song she offered Bono after turning down his idea; she recorded it in June and died on August 25 at 80.
By Riffiter
U2 announced Carnaval de Luz on September 24 and put out its lead single, "Silencio", the same day. The album is out November 13, and it is the band's first record of new songs since Songs of Experience in 2017. It closes on "Torn", a duet between Bono and Dolly Parton. Parton recorded her vocal in June, already ill. She died on August 25, at 80, and "Torn" is her last recorded vocal, according to the band.
Her song, not his
Bono did not go to Parton with "Torn". He went with an idea for something in an Irish folk vein, and she turned it down. "That's a little too Irish for me," she told him, as Bono tells it. Then she made a counter-offer: "I got this song. It's called 'Torn'; do you wanna see where you can take it somewhere else, maybe?"
He did. Bono and Snow Patrol's Johnny McDaid reworked her lyric into a story about a family coming apart, and the writing credit went to U2, Parton and McDaid. Daniel Lanois plays pedal steel on it. Most people will hear it as a U2 song with a famous guest. It began as a Parton song that she handed over unfinished.
None of it happened in one room. The pitch and the counter-offer were phone calls, and Parton cut her vocal remotely. No photo of the two of them together has surfaced, and there is no sign they were ever in a studio together for this.
Out of bed to sing it
Bono spoke about the session to Rolling Stone. The interview sits behind a paywall, and Billboard and American Songwriter have quoted it word for word. "When she got ill, she got out of her bed to sing this song. And you can hear that. And I can't even listen to it now." And on the take itself: "She sang her heart out, and I cannot believe that's an 80-year-old woman."
Parton went into Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center in Nashville on August 21 and died four days later, per NPR. The vocal on "Torn" was cut about two months before that.
Which one is the last
Two posthumous Parton songs arrive about two months apart, and their headlines seem to clash until the dates are laid out. "Bound to Ride", her recording for a Stanley Brothers tribute album, came out on September 9 and was covered as her first posthumous song. She recorded it at home in 2022. "Torn" was recorded four years later and comes out two months after it. So the song the public heard first is the older recording.
| Song | Recorded | Released |
|---|---|---|
| Bound to Ride | 2022 | September 9, 2026 |
| Torn | June 2026 | November 13, 2026 |
Archival releases have started too. The 1962 Mercury Recordings came out on August 28, three days after her death.
Nine years, with an asterisk
U2 and most of the coverage frame Carnaval de Luz as the first album in nine years. That holds only if "album" means new songs. Songs of Surrender came out in 2023: 40 old U2 songs, re-recorded, and a studio album on the discography count. That makes Carnaval de Luz album number 16.
U2 timed the announcement to the 50th anniversary of the "Drummer Seeks Musicians" note Larry Mullen Jr. wrote at Mount Temple school in Dublin in September 1976, the note that started the band. Fifty years on from that note, their new record closes on Parton's last take.