Sometimes, for reasons we don’t understand and can’t control, shit goes south; rather than thrashing against those inevitabilities, maybe it’s better to accept the minor defeats.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker

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It’s a great record, hardscrabble and honest and charming; Dolly Parton was just coming into her own as a writer and solo performer. All the tropes we now associate with country music—the idea that the genre boils down to “three chords and the truth,” as the songwriter Harlan Howard once put it—were beginning to crystallize. Parton was such a crucial engineer. Her writing contained enormous warmth and tenderness; unlike some of her erstwhile male colleagues, she possessed an almost uncanny capacity for empathy.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker

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Music takes on a different purpose by mid-August—who isn’t feeling a little lazy and crooked by now, spiritually overserved and ready for a nap? Crank the boom box; head to the hammock.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker

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“If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them,” Dolly Parton once said. She was talking about makeup and plastic surgery, things she felt no shame in loving, but it’s hard to read that quote and not also think about what it means to be a visionary—to invent a whole world from nothing.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker

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