Can We Be More Like Dolly Parton?

This morning, my friend Corey texted to tell me Dolly Parton died. He said he wanted me to hear it from a friend rather than stumble across it on Instagram. I'm so grateful he did. I stared at my phone. Holy crap, man.

For the better part of two years, Liz Aday and I have been working on a song called Parton Me. Last month, after approximately seventeen thousand sessions of writing, rewriting, singing, producing, laughing, questioning, and tinkering, we finally released it into the world. And today I cannot stop thinking about the timing.

The song begs the question: Can we be more like Dolly?

Not look like her. Not dress like her. Not imitate her or turn ourselves into caricatures of somebody who was so spectacularly herself.

Can we be a little bolder? A little braver. A little more imaginative and generous and kind. What if seeing someone live so unapologetically as herself could give the rest of us a little more courage to do the same?

That was the question while Dolly was alive.

And somehow, impossibly, it's still the question today.

I should probably start by saying I didn't know Dolly... obviously. I wasn't even the kind of lifelong superfan who could tell you every album or every chapter of her career. There are people grieving her today from a place much deeper and more personal than mine, and I don't want to borrow their grief.

I'm shocked. I'm saddened. I wish she were still here. But mostly, I find myself thinking about what the world just lost: a particularly bright prism of light.

There were qualities in Dolly that I admired the shit out of. Her humor. Her generosity. Her imagination. Her courage. Her tenderness. Her outrageous self-expression. The way she could be completely, unmistakably herself without seeming to require anybody else to become smaller in her presence.

There.

More of that, please!

That's what inspired the song.

And maybe it's also why today feels less like the meaning of Parton Me has disappeared and more like it has shifted underneath my feet.

There was always this ridiculous little hope tucked inside the project that the song might somehow reach Dolly herself. I knew the odds. But Music travels in strange ways, so I let myself keep the tiniest glimmer of hope that she might get to feel its wavelength.

I don't know whether she ever did, but boy am I ever grateful for this:

Our song made it into the world while she was still in it.

We made it while Dolly was alive. We released it while Dolly was alive. We got to be ridiculous about it on Instagram while Dolly was alive. We started making its music video while Dolly was alive.

For one little sliver of time, Parton Me got to exist simply as what it was always meant to be: happy and silly and colorful and hopeful and fun.

An invitation. Not a memorial.

Oh, what an enormous gift that feels like today.

The music video is still being made. Actually, we're right in the middle of making the dang thang.

And from the beginning, what mattered most to me was that I didn't want us to impersonate Dolly. So, Liz and I didn't coordinate outfits, or even try to make ourselves look alike. We didn't want blonde wigs and Dolly costumes. The whole point was almost exactly the opposite.

Maximum Liz. Maximum Allison.

Because if there's something worth borrowing from Dolly, surely it's bigger than her appearance.

It's her courage.

Borrow her courage to turn your own self-expression up to 11.

We've been building the visual world around that idea: camp, color, absurdity, individuality, chosen nonsense. Different people being spectacularly themselves while somehow belonging to the same strange little universe.

Yesterday, that felt joyful to me. Today, it feels joyful and poignant.

So, I don't want to change it. I don't want to suddenly drain the color from this thing because Dolly died. I don't want to turn a happy song into an elegy it was never meant to be. I want the camp. I want the ridiculousness. I want us to be too much.

Because that's how light keeps moving.

And leave it to Dolly to get a gal thinking about rainbows. It's actually kind of crazy because I've been thinking about the way prisms play with light all week long. Just last Tuesday, I was talking to Liz about this exact idea: what if we are all little individual prisms?

((I promise not to turn this into a lecture on optics or the human condition. But bear with me for a second))...

A prism doesn't make light. It receives it, bends it, reveals colors that were already there, and sends them somewhere new. And visible light contains a spectrum, d'uh... hence the rainbow... so I've been noodling on this idea that maybe we do, too. We are all little light catchers. Little prisms capable of warmth and coolness. Courage and fear. Generosity and self-protection. Light and shadow. Is part of being human recognizing that we have some choice about how we position ourselves toward the light and, therefore, what colors we send most brightly into the world? We carry all these different frequencies within us, and awareness gives us the ability to change our angle... to notice what we're emphasizing, what we're sending outward, and whether that's actually the frequency we want to amplify. So... what's your rainbow look like today?

All that was already swimming around in my head and now, suddenly, I'm thinking about it in terms of our sweet Dolly Parton.

Dolly caught the light. She refracted it in a way that could only have been hers. And an awful lot of us resonated with the colors.

Today, that particular prism is gone. Ooft. That's big. And permanent. And there are people who loved her personally who now have to adjust to an absence I can't begin to claim as my own. But I also can't help feeling the beauty inside this strange moment.

Maybe today, in my own little way, I just want to give her another prism's rainbow to slide up and over with.

Because the light didn't disappear with the prism.

It landed places. In people. In songs. In jokes and rhinestones and acts of generosity and outrageous ideas and moments when somebody somewhere decided to be a little more completely themselves. And then... those people get to send it somewhere else.

Is that what influence really is? And art? Maybe it's one of the most beautiful things about being here at all.

We catch some light, make our own colors with it, then pass through the veil, too.

And let the light keep moving.

Yesterday, Parton Me asked:

Can we be more like Dolly?

Today, it asks:

Can we be more like Dolly?

Not one word has changed.

And yet, somehow, the question contains an entirely different frequency.

I'm so grateful we got to ask it while she was still here.

And I'm so grateful we still get to answer it now. ✨💖🌈

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If you want to hear the little song-world where this question has been living...

come on in. 💖🎶✨