Dolly Parton’s upcoming album, Rockstar, features a reunion of Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr on her cover of “Let It Be,” and she tells the U.K.’s Absolute Radio just how she got the two Beatles to join her for the track.
“I’ve always loved that song,” Dolly says. “I recorded the song without them and then I thought, ‘Wow. Wouldn’t it be great if Paul McCartney would agree to play piano and sing on it?!’ And then I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it even be greater to have Ringo Starr – because that’s the last of The Beatles – play on that track?!’”
It turns out it wasn’t hard to convince them. Dolly explains, “I just asked if they’d do it and they said, ‘Yeah,’ and I was excited to death.” She adds, “They were so generous and so sweet about it. I was so, so touched with so many of the people on the album that they were so willing to do it.”
Mick Fleetwood and Peter Frampton also appear on the track, with Dolly’s noting, “I thought, ‘This is an all-star song!’”
Meanwhile, one person Dolly couldn’t get for the record was Rolling Stone frontman Mick Jagger, not that she didn’t try. The Mail quotes Dolly as saying, “I wanted Mick Jagger so bad, because my husband loves him.” She says she wanted him for her for a cover of “Satisfaction,” but he wanted to do “something new and different.”
“We kept looking for the right song,” she says, “but unfortunately he was doing an album in LA, and I was doing stuff in Nashville, and I kept missing him, but he wanted to do it.”
Dolly Parton’s Rockstar drops November 17. It is available for preorder now.
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