Dolly Parton’s 30 Best Songs

You may need to put this on directly following any playing of “Not for Me”… like, immediately, if you value your mental health at all. This is one of her more emotionally characteristic — that is, hopeful — songs about where the balance between life’s toils and its possibilities can pan out. As anyone who has taken even a semi-deep dive into Parton’s catalog knows, she is really, really, really into birds, with songs running the gamut from “Little Bird” to “Little Sparrow.” (OK, that doesn’t sound like a huge gamut, but it is.) In “Eagle When She Flies,” she brings two species of metaphor bird into the occasion, saying that, in a vulnerable state, we feel like sparrows, but when fortunes change for the better… well, you’ve seen the title.