Dolly Parton’s is the sort of career to be awed by, the kind that generation after generation of artists will look up to, admiring not only the music but her work ethic and social impact. But while Parton is overwhelmingly proud of everything she’s done, her one regret in her career is a strange one.

Parton’s impact goes way beyond the music. Obviously, the music leads the way, as Parton’s long list of hits solidified her star status. But as those songs made her rich and famous, it’s what she’s done with that platform that made her an international treasure. There’s a long list of social causes Parton has put her power behind; she helps aid children’s literacy worldwide, she helped fund the Covid vaccine, her theme park Dollywood pays for the children of every employee to go to college, and off the back of the success of Whitney Houston’s cover of ‘I Will Always Love You’, Parton invested the money made from those royalties into low-income black communities. It’s things like that which make Parton far more than just a musical star.

So, luckily, there are no real musical regrets in her career. She’s proud of her songs, where her music has taken her, the life it has allowed her to lead and the ways it has allowed her to help the world. But if there is one regret she has, it’s a strange one.

It seems that back in 2015, Parton fancied playing a game. She wrote a song, recorded it, and then, in a spur-of-the-moment decision, she buried it with no way of accessing it until 2045. “I have written a song that nobody’s going to hear until I’m 99 years old,” Parton told Kelly Clarkson in 2022, “And I might be there. I might not be.”

It’s the sort of gag that seemed really fun at the time as she was opening up the Dollywood DreamMore Resort and decided to bury an unheard song in the grounds of the new hotel. “It would be a song that will never be heard until 30 years from the time we opened the resort,” She explained, “They said, ‘You’ll be long dead.’ I said, ‘Well, maybe not. I’ll be 99. I’ve seen people live to be older than that. So I wrote this song, and I can’t say what it is.” But as time went on, the idea of that song bothered her more and more.

“You have no idea how that has bothered me,” she admitted, adding, “I want to dig that up so bad. It’s a really good song.” Now, ten years on from the moment she buried it, the fun plan doesn’t feel quite as fun anymore as the remembrance of this great track seems to almost torment the singer as she knows that there is definitely a risk that she may never get to hear it again.

It feels personal to her as she definitely underestimated quite how attached an artist gets to their music and how torturous it would be to have that attachment be this strained. “That’s like burying one of my kids, putting it on ice or something, and I won’t be around to see it brought back to life,” she wrote in her memoir, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics. It really is that personal to her as she added, “It’s just burning me up inside that I have to leave it in there.”

However, there is also a risk that no one will hear it. After so long being buried in the ground, who knows what will happen to the quality of that recording or even what world it might emerge to in 2045? With hopes that the great song will survive, Parton said, “Hopefully, it will play, and the whole thing ain’t rotted.”