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Dolly Parton Covers Billy Joel, and 8 More New Songs

Dolly Parton Covers Billy Joel and 8 More New Songs
Hear tracks by Mumford & Sons and Pharrell Williams, Julian Lage, feeo and others.
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Dolly Parton Covers Billy Joel, and 8 More New Songs

Hear tracks by Mumford & Sons and Pharrell Williams, Julian Lage, feeo and others.

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Dolly Parton, in a pink-and-white strappy dress, waves in front of a bright pink background.
Dolly Parton has added new bonus tracks to a deluxe edition of her most recent album, “Rockstar.”Credit...Anna Gordon/Reuters
Jon ParelesLindsay Zoladz

Jon Pareles and

Jan. 19, 2024, 12:42 p.m. ET

Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new tracks. Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes), and sign up for The Amplifier, a twice-weekly guide to new and old songs.

Dolly Parton, ‘The Entertainer’

Now that she’s released the deluxe edition — in honor of her 78th birthday, on Friday! — Dolly Parton’s already sprawling double album “Rockstar” runs nearly three hours long and clocks in at an indefatigably rockin’ 39 tracks. This makes finding the album’s buried treasures that much more exhausting, but luckily one sparkles out from the heap of newly released bonus tracks: her ornately arranged and deeply felt cover of Billy Joel’s 1974 single “The Entertainer.” Joel’s version was full of a young upstart’s gimlet-eyed cynicism — “If you’re gonna have a hit, you gotta make it fit, so they cut it down to 3:05,” he sang on a kind of spiritual sequel to the earlier “Piano Man” — but Parton sings it from the opposite end of a long career, finding fresh meaning in his words. “I know the game, you’ll forget my name,” she sings, with a slight ache in her voice. “And I won’t be here in another year, if I don’t stay on the charts.” Given that “Rockstar” became the highest-charting album of Parton’s career just a few months ago, that fate seems, blessedly, unlikely. LINDSAY ZOLADZ

Mumford & Sons and Pharrell Williams, ‘Good People’

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