We all know Dolly Parton can write. There are plenty of indelible couplets across the country legend’s 48 albums. But can she write a novel? The world will find out on Monday when she follows in Bill Clinton’s footsteps to publish a collaboration with American literary juggernaut James Patterson. The double-name recognition alone all but guarantees a mega-bestseller. And if you can’t wait til then, here’s the album of the book, which probably spoils the plot to an extent with songs such as Lost and Found and Dark Night, Bright Future, but at least Patterson leaves the music to his partner.
Of course this Rose smells more like a money-printing marketing exercise than any deep-rooted desire to produce a great American novel. While most musicians stop at a shoe range, a fragrance or a minor acting sideline, Parton has already had more brand crossovers than KitKat. There’s the Dollywood theme park, 9 to 5: The Musical, a Netflix series called Heartstrings that turns her best known songs into dramas, and she already did a children’s book telling the story of Coat of Many Colors. Pushing into the future, this book and its music are about to become Spotify’s first “immersive listening experience”, and the 76-year-old is also promising “Dolly-inspired NFT artwork” and a “free live performance on the blockchain”.
Phew. So it’s comforting that the album itself is significantly more straightforward than all the elements around it. It’s simple, from the repeated one-word chorus of Run to the rollicking fiddle of Driven. The rhymes go exactly where you would expect, making the choruses singalongable the moment they wheel around a second time. Aside from the schmaltzier production style on the ballad Secrets, all of these compositions sound like they could have been recorded decades before anyone would have thought they required the assistance of the blockchain and an immersive listening experience. The whooshing Firecracker, with its racing banjo and energetic harmonies, is old fashioned to the extent that she even throws in an Elvis impersonation halfway through.
Like Patterson’s copious novels, Run Rose Run also sounds formulaic, undemanding, like she’s written similar things many times before, but it’ll take a lot more than that to start a backlash against a woman who not long ago was in the news for donating $1 million to coronavirus vaccine research. The songs are still good enough to deserve more than status as footnotes to a book.
