Dolly Parton never met a song she couldn't make her own

Hello, Episodes subscribers!

Starting today, our Monday newsletters will be a digest, offering Lily and my takes on the week in pop culture that was, a roundup of what we published the week before, and some links to other stuff we liked out there on the wider internet. These newsletters will now be open to all.

We were going to make this shift on Labor Day, but some very sad news made this week the right time to start.

Dolly Parton: country's queen of covers

Dolly Parton, possibly the last remaining American everybody could agree on, died last week at the age of 80. The tributes that resulted focused heavily on her considerable philanthropy, her songwriting prowess, and her supposedly apolitical nature. (Considering how heavily Parton gave to charities aimed at helping the poor – especially poor children – and her advocacy for queer people at a time when doing so was decidedly outside the American mainstream, I think calling her "apolitical" is deeply misleading, but here we are.)

But like so many musicians who first started performing in church, Parton was also astonishingly good at covering other songwriters' music, a thing that many people seemed largely surprised to learn about after her passing. But especially in the second half of her career, Parton recorded more and more covers of less and less expected songs. Like I actually quite love Collective Soul's "Shine," a '90s grunge classic that sounds like it could maybe be a deeply spiritual tune if the right artist interpreted it. Well, that artist was Dolly Parton, and she gave the song a country gospel spin that makes you want to believe she's in Heaven.

Or what if she sang Neil Young's "After the Gold Rush" with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, in one of those covers that gains so much being sung by people in the second half of their lives?

Sometimes, she would even tackle a classic song right alongside the person who made it famous, as when she covered "Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me" alongside Elton John himself on her final album. The resulting duet mostly sticks to the script but adds a ghostly gospel chorus to the background.

But even at her 1970s and 1980s peak, Parton peppered her albums with a handful of covers of songs only she saw the country glory in. Like Jackie Wilson's "(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher and Higher," which she finds the bluegrass twang in.

Or this cover of "House of the Rising Sun," which rips, especially if you've always asked yourself whether the song could use some more disco in it.

Dolly also recorded a ton of great Christmas covers, especially with her pal Kenny Rogers. I'm not going to link to any of those. Instead, here's a truly cursed version of her singing Mariah Carey's "All I Want for Christmas Is You" with Jimmy Fallon. Dolly's verses are good!

Sorry about that. Let's cleanse this newsletter with something much better.

Finally, of course, we should not ignore that she once sang Sly and the Family Stone's "Everyday People" with Kermit the Frog, a thing that nobody else has ever done because who could hope to match Dolly and Kermit's effervescence?

Dolly Parton loved almost nothing more than making music, and she loved a huge variety of music to boot. That her sheer omnivorous musical taste translated into such a wide variety of pitch-perfect covers ended up being a huge boon to those of us who love a cover that seems like it shouldn't work... and then works so well. RIP to a true queen of the cover. –Emily St. James

A Good Look

Few things in life are better than Miss Teen Indiana Kiersten Alvarado's tribute to her home state: a Garfield she hollowed out and wore as a suit. (Found here.) –ESJ

The Episodes Crop Art Review, 2026 edition

As many of you may know, I am an aficionado of the Minnesota State Fair. And, lo, the happiest time of the year is once again upon us: The State Fair is on from now until Labor Day. I've been twice already, and I've got plans for a third trip at the very time this newsletter is going live!

Per usual, the highlight of the fair is the crop art, which I wrote about at length for Episodes last year. Even more so than in recent years, the art in 2026 has a pronounced left-wing political slant to it.* It's hard not to connect that to Operation Metro Surge, particularly considering the amount of crop art specifically depicting Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and the ordinary Minnesotans who fought back against ICE. Still, it wouldn't be a crop art year without some fun pop culture pieces, too. Here's a look at some of my fave pieces from this year's (heh) crop of entries!

*I will note that this was the first time I've seen right wing culture war grievance crop art at the fair — maybe some Trump freaks read my crop art piece from last year and decided it was time for them to give it a go! That said, what little MAGA art there is at the fair is massively outnumbered by anti-Trump pieces. It's also profoundly lazy: The most notable piece is a big black-and-white "FAUCI LIED," with no other decorations or embellishments.

This riff on Picasso's Guernica by Jennifer Nelson has already been the talk of the fair on Bluesky, and for good reason. (You can see a higher-res version of it here.) It's smaller than you might think — crop art is a ton of effort! — but, amid a sea of jokey pieces, it's utterly arresting, a painstaking and profoundly Minnesotan tribute to two Minnesota martyrs.

Speaking of those jokey pop-culture pieces, though, I am kind of obsessed with Olivia Newroz's über-faithful recreation of that one Buffy GIF of Spike pretending to bite Joyce. Extra points for the beanwork on Joyce's necklace, and for capturing the ultra-crunchy texture of the source image in crop form.

As soon as that one viral photo of the ICE agent eating shit on a slick of actual ice hit the internet, I remember realizing that it, too, would soon become seed art. Thank you very much to Annie Russell-Pribnow for proving me right! I especially appreciate the balloons and the accuracy with which the agent's kid-on-a-Slip-n-Slide splayed legs are rendered.

In terms of pure craftsmanship, I'm in awe of this mosaic-style piece by Charlotte Ferlic. The grayscale really captures the feeling of seeing a loon on a drizzly lake, and it's all made from birch bark and wild rice!

Many crop artists start working on their pieces months in advance, so there weren't any official tributes to Dolly Parton or Tim Curry, who died two days before the fair's opening, on display. Still, I thought it was lovely that fair officials had set up some templates and bins of seeds near the entrance to the exhibit so that we the guests could make our own! At first, I was slightly disappointed that this didn't read "Don't dream it, bean it," but even in crop art there should be some tact and restraint. —Lily Osler

Let's watch Olivia Rodrigo and Sarah McLachlan sing "Building a Mystery," shall we?

Buy Emily's It's a Wonderful Life book!

Believe it or not, we're less than a month away from the publication of Every Time a Bell Rings, the book about It's a Wonderful Life that I cowrote with Defector's Lauren Theisen! It is – I say with some pride – a very strange book that is less a making-of or a historical document and more an attempt to consider the film from a variety of angles, major character by major character. There are essays about World War II PTSD, whether Bedford Falls had any gays in it, and Donna Reed's impossible standard for womanhood. Buy it today, and if you're in Los Angeles, come to our launch event at Village Well in Culver City! –ESJ

Some pop culture things we're into

Here are quick looks at some of the stuff we're digging right now.

• I like David Robert Mitchell's The End of Oak Street more the more I think about it. It's so fucking weird in a way that I didn't quite appreciate while watching the movie because I kept trying to make the movie's character work something other than heavily cliché. What kept me engaged was Mitchell's peerless construction of suspense sequences – seriously, there are few better at pulling off a dinosaur chase – but what I keep thinking about is how thoroughly this movie takes Reagan era cruelty at face value. This movie focuses on a family doing anything it can to stay together – while their neighbors die out of focus in the background. Literally! –ESJ
• Once again, America's dads are right because The Shawshank Redemption, which I hadn't seen in at least 25 years, if not longer. Speaking of It's a Wonderful Life, this movie strikes me as the closest anybody not named Frank Capra came to making a vintage Capra classic, ably blending the depths of despair and euphoric release. Indeed, studying what Frank Darabont took from Capra's movies makes it all the more curious that he flopped so hard when trying to more directly copy Capra. –ESJ
• Did you guys know that Clue, while by no means a masterpiece, is way better than it has any right to be? Honestly, if you're in the demographic to be reading this newsletter, yes, you probably did. But still, bears repeating: it's an utter delight. The whole thing is proof positive that murder mysteries don't actually have to, you know, "be possible to figure out" or "make sense" in order to be fun. Thank you, Tim Curry, for almost giving yourself a heart attack filming this one! —LO

Last week in Episodes...

• We bid a fond farewell to the Monday Rundown with some thoughts on train travel with a 3-year-old.
• Emily's 26 Episodes feature reached 2015 – and one of the best installments of one of TV's best-ever shows: The Leftovers.

The Leftovers is perhaps the most influential TV show in history to have been watched by essentially no one when it aired. Across its three seasons, it rarely garnered much of an audience, drawing the most eyeballs to its morose, somewhat baffling pilot. One has to imagine a healthy number of those people backed out of the room saying, “NOOOOPE” when invited to watch more. (I love all three seasons of the show to pieces, but I will admit Season 1 is a tough hang.) 

• Our Infinite Jest book club reached the halfway point with some of the book's best passages.
• Lily commemorated the death of Tim Curry with a ranking of Rocky Horror musical moments – in order of how likely they are to awaken something within you.

By the song's end, he's sobbing through his makeup, a smile emerging beneath the tears. Yes, it's funny in exactly the way it's meant to be — here's this space alien murderer singing an emotional little ballad about never quite fitting in anywhere — but it's also legitimately a bit moving. It's ridiculous that Dr. Frank-N-Furter should have a sense of pathos, especially at this point in the film, and yet Curry pulls it off.

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Discuss

What are your favorite covers that seem like they shouldn't work but actually succeed with flying colors? Tell us in the comments or the Discord!

Some good links

Adults levels up into a great comedy in Season Two [What's Alan Watching]
Notes on Camp: Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma [Jude Doyle]
Everyone misremembers "Woke 1" [Burns Notice]
Soraya [Just Atad]
Pundit Portrait: Bret Stephens [If Books Could Kill]
Let's remember when Tim Curry played a huge scary red guy [Defector]
An Oral History of Tim Curry's Escape to the One Place Uncorrupted by Capitalism [Vice]

A Good Song

Fine, one more for the road.

The free edition of Episodes is published every Monday and every other Wednesday. Premium subscribers get those newsletters, plus extra ones every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday. Our editor-in-chief is Emily St. James, and our managing editor is Lily Osler. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).