Dolly Parton has been making music for decades and just months ago released a new album. Now, the music icon says she has a rock album on the way – but that it won’t be accompanied with a music tour.
In March, Parton released “Run, Rose, Run,” a 12-track country album unveiled as a companion to her first novel of the same name, which she wrote alongside bestselling author James Patterson. The novel, a fiction thriller “about a young singer-songwriter on the rise and on the run, determined to do whatever it takes to survive,” will also be made into a feature film under Reese Witherspoon’s media company Hello Sunshine.
Last week in an interview with PollStar Magazine, the Grammy award-winning music artist said that she’s working on a rock ‘n’ roll record as well, an endeavor she embarked on after she was nominated for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the spring.
She pulled herself out of the nominations, saying she didn’t think she’d earned the right to be nominated since she had never recorded a rock album.
“I do hope the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame will understand and be willing to consider me again – if I’m ever worthy,” she said in a statement in March. “This has, however, inspired me to put out a hopefully great rock n’ roll album at some point in the future, which I have always wanted to do.”
Despite her self-exclusion, Parton was inducted into the Hall of Fame in May.
She told Pollstar that she immediately considered a new album when she got the nomination, thinking, “Why not just go ahead and do it while the iron’s hot?” She said it will be a “real good album” that she plans on wrapping up after she finishes with the “Run, Rose, Run” film.
“I had to do a rock album, because if I’m going to be in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, I’m going to by God earn it! That’s my attitude toward it. There’s no way I’m not going to do an album, so people can see that I could and can do it,” she said. “…I even wrote a song about the whole situation to sing at the ceremony. A fine, cute little rock ‘n’ roll song that’ll probably go on the rock ‘n’ roll album. It’s called ‘Rockin.””
But even with her first rock album on the way, Parton said it won’t be accompanied by a tour. She said she’ll do “special shows here and there,” but, “I do not think I will ever tour again.”
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“I have no intention of going on a full-blown tour anymore. I’ve done that my whole life, and it takes so much time and energy,” she said, adding that she wants to stay closer to home with her husband, as they are both “getting older now.”
Parton and her husband, Carl Dean, have known each other since 1964, when they met outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat on the first day Parton had moved to Nashville, Tennessee. He “swept her off her feet” and the couple married two years later. They have been together ever since.
“I don’t want to be gone for four or five weeks at a time. Something could happen,” she said. “I would not feel right about that, if I were gone and somebody needed me. Or I would feel bad if I had to leave a tour if somebody got sick at home and needed me and then I had to walk out on the fans.”
