Jewel's latest track is a special one: Not only is it a song that has been waiting to be recorded for years, it was also a chance for the singer to collaborate with one of her biggest idols, Dolly Parton.

Jewel penned the new track, "My Father's Daughter," back in 2008, and the song has been a hit during live shows over the years, but it's now appearing on her recently released album, Picking Up the Pieces, as a duet with Parton.

“When you grow up as a girl on a homestead with an outhouse, you don’t have many heroes in the public eye," Jewel tells Time magazine. "Dolly and Loretta [Lynn] ... had a similar lifestyle to me. I loved their audacity. They were women who were so outspoken, and they had no shame in being who they were. They were so ahead of their time, and I always thought it was quite heroic.

"So I asked [Dolly] to sing on the song, and I was pretty surprised she said yes. I’m tremendously honored," Jewel adds. "We got in the studio, she started at 8AM and was 10 minutes early and well prepared and looked amazing and was sarcastic and witty and everything you would hope Dolly Parton would be.”

A majority of the tracks off of Picking Up the Pieces were written throughout the past 20 years but are just now finding a place on a record. Part of Jewel's choice to look back at older songs may have to do with the uprooting of her personal life after the end of her six-year marriage to bull rider Ty Murray in July of 2014.

“I was going through a divorce and looking at my entire person and saying, 'What is my essential self?'" she says. "I don’t think there was an area of my life that wasn’t touched."

The four-time Grammy Awards winner also recently released a memoir, Never Broken, which shares her life and struggles with her fans, with the hope that her experiences may help those who read the book.

“It took a lot of courage to share these things so honestly, but I felt compelled because I am keenly aware that I am not the only one in life who is struggling,” Jewel says. “While my struggle might be unique in some ways to my life, suffering is far from uncommon. My hope is that in sharing how I have come to look at my life — what has taken me 40 years and a lot of pain to learn — might benefit and inspire any of you who might be needing encouragement and tools for dealing with your own struggles.”

Picking Up the Pieces is available for download from iTunes and Amazon.

Listen to Jewel and Dolly Parton, "My Father's Daughter":

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