U2 Releases First Album in 9 Years, Launches World Tour for 50th Anniversary

Q: What secret lies behind Dolly Parton choosing a track on U2's new album for her final recorded vocal performance?

The “secret” was not a long-planned farewell, but a last-minute, deeply personal collaboration that began when Bono approached Dolly Parton for a different project and she redirected him to one of her own unfinished songs. According to Bono, he originally wanted Parton for an Irish folk-inspired side project, but she told him the material was “a little too Irish” for her. Instead, she offered him a song called “Torn” and invited him to see if he could take it somewhere else. Bono and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid then reworked the lyric, turning it into a song about a mother watching her family split apart. Parton kept a writing credit and agreed to sing the new version. What gives the track its emotional weight is the timing. Parton recorded her vocal in June, after she had become ill. Bono said she got out of bed to sing it, and that “you can hear that” in the performance. Producer Garret “Jacknife” Lee said she later approved the final mix and was proud of the result. So the hidden story behind her choosing a track on U2’s new album is that she effectively chose it herself: she declined Bono’s original idea, offered “Torn” instead, helped reshape it, and delivered what has now become the final recorded vocal of her career on the album’s closing track.

3 articles · Updated · The Guardian · Nov 6

Carnaval de Luz gives U2 its first album of new material in nearly nine years, arriving alongside a new world tour as the band marks 50 years since its 1976 formation.
50 years is also the backdrop for a burst of activity that already included the EPs Days of Ash and Easter Lily, a commemorative show at Dublin’s Mount Temple school and a secret Tate Modern set built around Brian Eno collaborations.
Larry Mullen’s return is central to the relaunch after his neck surgery forced him out of the 2023-24 Las Vegas Sphere residency; the Edge said the band would not feel like the same U2 without all four members.
Carnaval de Luz shifts from the anger of the recent EPs toward community and defiant joy, while Bono still casts the political moment as darker and more “fascistic” than past right-wing eras.
The release caps a turbulent decade that included the iTunes backlash, health setbacks and uneven albums, but U2 is presenting the new record and tour as proof the original lineup still has a distinct role.