Dolly Parton has done it all. She has asserted her primacy over the reactionary forces of Nashville’s music industry, sold 100m records, written umpteen classic songs, broken into Hollywood, opened her own amusement park and had a species of lichen, a Soviet battle tank and a cloned sheep named in her honour. It’s a delightful, fully deserved state of affairs, but it comes with a problem attached: what do you do next?
Her 49th solo album attempts to answer this question. Rockstar came about when Parton was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. She first declined to be inducted, saying she was a country artist, then reconsidered, announcing she would record a rock album to justify her inclusion. One wants to like the results – as the Hall of Fame story, with its cocktail of self-deprecation and can-do attitude underlines, Parton isn’t just hugely talented but immensely likable – yet a distinct sense of panic sets in when you see the tracklist, on which a sprinkling of Parton originals mix with covers often featuring the original artists or big-name latter day substitutes: Elton John, Paul McCartney, Stevie Nicks, Pink. The song selection suggests either Parton has what you might charitably describe as a very basic relationship with rock music, or she’s opted for marquee-name crowd pleasing. It looks like a forced march through the results of a Radio 2 poll to find The Nation’s Favourite Rock Anthems: We Are the Champions and We Will Rock You, Stairway to Heaven and (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction, Every Breath You Take, Free Bird, Let It Be, Heart of Glass and – there’s no accounting for taste in these polls, is there? – What’s Up? by 4 Non Blondes. But it’s the sheer length of the tracklist that gets you searching for a brown paper bag to breathe into. It goes on and on like a blockbuster movie’s end credits. Rockstar features 30 songs and lasts the best part of two and half hours, which even someone desperate to hear Dolly Parton sing Stairway to Heaven a deux with Lizzo might consider too much of a good thing.
Rockstar might have got away with the obviousness of its material if it had opted to do something interesting with it, but virtually every cover here seems to have been made as close to the original version as possible: listening to it feels like being trapped in a karaoke bar where Dolly Parton, having taken the stage to surprise and general rejoicing, is now drunkenly refusing to let go of the microphone. She still has a great voice, but it’s also a hugely distinctive one, and the sense that it doesn’t necessarily fit these songs in these arrangements is hard to avoid. For some reason, she sounds particularly jarring essaying We Are the Champions. She absolutely belts out Every Breath You Take, which doesn’t do much for the song’s subtly creepy undercurrent.
Not everything here is bad. She sounds great on the downhome southern rock of Freebird and duetting with goddaughter Miley Cyrus on Wrecking Ball. Creedence Clearwater Revival’s Long As I Can See the Light has a hymnal mood, which suits her perfectly. Parton’s own songs range from pretty good to great, although whether My Blue Tears, originally from 1971’s Coat of Many Colours, is much improved by the addition of a vocal by Simon Le Bon is a moot point at best. Bygones, however, is a hoot – Parton-penned stadium metal that doesn’t sound like pastiche, bolstered by appearances from Rob Halford and Nikki Sixx – but it does make you think: hang on, if you can write rock songs to this standard yourself, what on earth are doing trudging your way through Keep on Loving You in the company of REO Speedwagon’s lead singer?
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It’s not the only way you can envisage Rockstar being approached differently, with more enjoyable results. It might have been better had Parton invited these songs into her own world: clearly, hearing a country or bluegrass version of 4 Non Blondes’ What’s Up? is unlikely to be top of anyone’s musical bucket list, but it has to be an improvement on the identikit version here. But, of course, a country album would have been missing the point. Rockstar opens with a skit in which Parton, apparently practising widdly-woo metal guitar, is interrupted by a couple of chewy southern accents advising her to stick to what she knows. They are presumably meant to recall the naysayers of Music Row, whom Parton heroically defied earlier in her career. But from the perspective of a listener tearfully pleading for mercy midway through a version of Aerosmith’s I Want You Back – on which Parton and Steven Tyler both deliver their vocals with such torrential force it sounds less like a duet than a systematic attempt to damage each other’s hearing – the chewy-accented naysayers start to seem not closed-minded gatekeepers but the voices of common sense.
This week Alexis listened to
PinkPantheress – Bury Me ft Kelela
I’m enjoying this now, before my teenage daughter plays it so frequently that I never want to hear it again: PP’s Auto-Tuned sugariness perfectly tempered by Kelela’s leftfield R&B cool.
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