Dolly Parton talks new album 'Blue Smoke'

LOS ANGELES (KABC) -- Despite worldwide fame, Dolly Parton still considers herself a simple country girl who loves to write songs and sing them. Her brain is always thinking -- often in rhyme!

"Everything's a song to me," the 68-year-old Country Music Hall of Famer said. "I'll just be watching the news on TV and they'll be telling some story and I'll think, 'oh, what a good idea.'"

She's put plenty of her good ideas into "Blue Smoke," her new album with a country-bluegrass flavor.

"If I've got the songs together, I can go in and have a record done in two months and have it ready to come out," Parton said. "It may not be as quality or as involved as someone else's who's taken forever to do. But it's good enough for me."

She sure has her classics, but in this album Parton sings her version of Bob Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right." And she puts a twist on the Bon Jovi hit, "Lay Your Hands on Me."

"So I called Richie and Jon -- Richie Sambora and Jon Bon Jovi -- and I said, 'well, I am thinking about... I would love to do this as a gospel thing. Could you all help me put this together as a gospel song?' And they said, 'yeah, what a great idea,'" she recalled.

Parton wrote many of the songs on the album, her first in three years, and also sings duets with Willie Nelson and Kenny Rogers.

And Parton says she's not done yet. She recently announced hundreds of millions of dollars in business investments and will tour the world this year.

"I just keep on keeping on," Parton said. "So as long as I'm able to do it physically and mentally, if God's good to me, I'll be doing this until I keel over dead one day right in the middle of something I love to do."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.