The Last Song: Dolly Parton's Final Vocal Closes U2's New Album

Somewhere in the track listing of Carnaval De Luz, U2's first album in nine years, sits a song that will likely draw more attention than anything else on the record — not for how it sounds, but for what it turned out to be.

"Torn," the closing track, is a duet between Bono and Dolly Parton. Co-written by U2, Parton and Johnny McDaid, it's billed by the band's own label as "a tender country song detailing broken family ties that holds wider resonances." It's also, quietly, the last vocal performance Dolly Parton ever recorded.

That fact reframes the whole record around it, whether U2 intended it to or not. Carnaval De Luz doesn't stand alone — it's the third part of a loose triptych that began with two surprise EPs earlier this year, Days Of Ash, released on Ash Wednesday, and Easter Lily, released on Good Friday. Together the three works trace the liturgical calendar backwards and forwards: carnival, the celebration of the flesh before Lent's denial; ash, the reflection of Lent itself; and Easter, the rebirth on the other side. "Torn" is the thread the band has said runs through all three — and now it carries an ending neither the record's concept nor its title anticipated.

Produced by Jacknife Lee, with Daniel Lanois adding pedal steel to "Torn" specifically, the song sits apart from the rest of an album otherwise pulled toward "experimental" and "strict songwriting," in the band's own description — collaborations with Brian Eno and Martin Garrix elsewhere on the record, additional production from Ryan Tedder on lead single "Silencio." Against that backdrop, "Torn" is the quiet one: two voices, a family story, and now a coda that wasn't supposed to be one.

Bono has framed Carnaval De Luz as a record built against "all kinds of creatures" lurking at the edges of the light — a way of saying the darker the moment, the louder the drums, the bigger the fire. It's a fitting description for an album that closes, unexpectedly, in real loss. Parton's death turned a country duet about broken family ties into something else entirely: not a planned farewell, but one all the same.

Carnaval De Luz is out November 13 via Island Records.