The Overlap Between Dolly Parton’s Audience and Mine

There are a lot of things I would've expected to change my creative life: mastering music theory, becoming proficient at the guitar, opening my DAW without having to spend the first hour troubleshooting. Dolly Parton talking about entertaining God was... not on my bingo card.

I'm not even remotely religious. So, when I tell you that's the sentence that followed me home from a walk one afternoon, both a cringe and a smile still compete on my face.

I was walking my dogs around the neighborhood, listening to Songteller, when Dolly described creating as a way of entertaining God. Like that's what she'd been doing since she was a little girl... just over there trying to keep God entertained.

I wish I could tell you exactly what she said. I can't. What I do remember with some real precision, though, is what happened inside me. Somewhere between one block and the next, my brain started wondering:

What if I entertained myself first?

That was it. No lightning bolt or choir of angels. No cinematic swell of strings. Just one little question that suddenly felt much more interesting than whatever I'd been thinking about before that.

I finished my walk, went home, and started writing Parton Me.

Part of me still feels like writing that song was the point of the question because it came out like a fully formed piece of fruit, as though I had simply found it. Now I'm starting to think grasping the question was the point of the song.

Because here's the thing...

I've never been afraid of work. I'll happily spend hours rewriting a lyric, chasing a melody, focusing on a transition, or rebuilding a website from scratch because I think there's a better version hiding underneath the one I have. The work has never scared me. The part that gets me is forgetting to play.

Somewhere along the way, I tend to turn creating into a test.

Every note has to prove something.

Every lyric has to earn its place.

Every first draft suddenly has the impossible job of being good before it's allowed to exist. Which is incredibly boring.

Not Music.

Me.

I'm boring.

I'm sitting there staring at a guitar instead of making noise with it.

If there really is a God sitting on a cloud somewhere watching all of this unfold, I have a feeling clunky guitar practice is infinitely more entertaining than watching me spend an hour wondering whether I should pick the thing up at all.

Nothing gets made while I'm standing on the sidelines evaluating whether or not I'm ready.

Things get made when I finally laugh at myself, miss a few notes, stumble into something unexpected, and realize somewhere around the second chorus that I forgot to be afraid. That's actually happened enough times now that I'm starting to trust it.

Because every single time I let myself play, I end up somewhere I never could have planned my way to. And the view is worth every bump in the ride, every time.

When I play, my god, I entertain myself.

And maybe that's the overlap between Dolly Parton's audience and mine.

An audience of ONE.

Not a crowd.

Not critics.

Not algorithms.

Not applause.

Just the one listener who is present before anyone else ever hears a note.

The one who knows whether I'm actually playing. The one who knows whether I'm hiding. The one who is infinitely more entertained by a clunky song taking shape than by another hour of me wishing I were brave enough to begin.

That's the audience I want to remember.

That's the audience I want to entertain.

I'm writing this down because I know another day is coming where I'll wake up convinced I need to have everything figured out before I begin.

Note to self: Future-Allison, you don't.

Sing it out loud.

Play the guitar.

Write that first idea down.

Laugh when it's terrible.

Keep going.

It's a lot more entertaining than standing still.

And if it entertains someone else along the way...

well...

that's a pretty wonderful bonus.

♾️