Locked Until 2045

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a music box, wound once, in a sealed room)

[Verse 1]
There is a song nobody has heard. She wrote it, she recorded it,
she put it in a sealed box in a chamber at Dollywood in 2015
and the box does not open until 2045, and the instructions are specific:
it may not be opened early, not for any reason, and not by her either.

[Chorus]
Locked until 2045. A song in a box in a mountain,
with a letter, and the whole thing behind glass where you can go and look at it,
and thousands of people every year stand in front of a box
that has a Dolly Parton song inside it that has never been played.

[Verse 2]
She said she would be eighty-nine when it opened and she hoped to be there.
She said it with a shrug, the way she said everything, and moved on.
She died at eighty, this week, in Nashville, in August 2026,
and the box is still shut, and it stays shut for nineteen more years.

[Chorus]
Locked until 2045. And nobody knows what it is.
Not the label. Not the family. Not the people who built the chamber.
There is a new song by the most covered songwriter in country music
sitting in the dark in a mountain in Tennessee, and we all have to wait.

[Bridge]
And there is the other vault, the one that is not a joke —
the thousands of songs she wrote and never released, boxed and catalogued,
because she wrote every day, most days, for sixty years,
and there is more of her still coming than most writers ever finish at all.

[Outro]
(the music box runs down but does not finish)
2045.
Nineteen more years.
Nobody knows what it is.