‘It’s a Long, Long Road, Brother’: How Ringo Starr Found New Inspiration in Nashville

It’s good to know that one thing in this crazy world never changes: Ringo Starr remains the most charming man on the planet. The Beatles legend might be the most universally beloved figure in the music world, but even at the age of 85, he’s got more songs in him. As he cackles, “It’s like my 4-year-old granddaughter says: ‘Siri, play Ringo!’”

Ringo is getting ready to drop his new country album, Long Long Road, with the single “Choose Love” available on Friday. He made it with producer T Bone Burnett, a year after their acclaimed Nashville collaboration Look Up. “I love country music, so it wasn’t hard,” Ringo says. But he gets a little help from his friends, including hot young vanguard artists like Molly Tuttle and Billy Strings, as well as stars like Sheryl Crow and St. Vincent.

Ringo’s relentless vitality is a marvel, 60 years after the man sang “Yellow Submarine.” When you see him onstage these days, he’s a whirlwind, constantly in motion. It raises the question: would Ringo agree he’s still the best dancer in rock & roll? “Yes, I agree,” he says. “I’m just sort of a mover.”

He’s truly an inspiration — he spends the show either drumming or shimmying, when he could probably get away with an armchair. “That would be so great,” he says. “The drum chair is like an armchair: ‘Okay, let’s goooo.’ No, you’ve got to be upright and into it.”

Long Long Road shows that Ringo’s still into it, as always. He surprised everyone last year with Look Up, his first country record since his 1970 solo gem Beaucoups of Blues. But he sounds invigorated by making a Nashville album that’s legitimately up to date, with cutting-edge musicians. “That’s who he is,” Burnett says. “He’s been a convener for a long time, and a collaborator.”

On Long Long Road, due on April 24,he’s playing with a cast of new-school renegade pickers including Tuttle, Strings, and Sarah Jarosz. “Isn’t that far out?” Ringo says. “Molly’s been so great, and Billy Strings is amazing. What a great welcoming I had when I went to Nashville. It was just a great experience, so we just got on and made another one.”

The single “Choose Love” is a twanged-up remake of the title song from his 2005 album, where Ringo sings the line, “The long and winding road is more than a song.” That line still resonates for him. “It’s a long, long road, brother,” he says. “It’s sort of my life: leaving Liverpool, living in London, getting to New York, coming to L.A. So that’s why I want to call it Long Long Road. I wasn’t even going to call it “It’s A…” because that’s giving it length. Just Long Long Road can go on forever.”

Ringo radiates all his famous wisdom and mirth, as well as his wall-shaking laughter. (As John Lennon told him in A Hard Day’s Night, “You’re a window-rattler, son.”) Today, his Zoom screen has a background of a tropical beach with palm trees. “I like to have this on,” he says. “It’s a backdrop for the winter. Then when the summer comes, we’ll have something else.” He drops quintessential Ringosophical proverbs like, “I just get up in the morning, do my stuff, and do my stuff.”

Last year, he made his debut at the Grand Ole Opry, at Emmylou Harris’ invitation. He performed “Act Naturally,” the Buck Owens classic he croons on the Beatles’ Help! He also filmed the special Ringo & Friends at the Ryman, featuring stars from Brenda Lee to Rodney Crowell to Jack White, who sang “Don’t Pass Me By.” (Tuttle did the honors on “Octopus’s Garden.”) The Ryman special also had a tribute from an old mate, Paul McCartney, who knows something about long and winding roads. As Macca said, “He was the first guy in the Beatles to really turn us on to country music.”

The new album continues his Nashville Ringossance. “I like to think I made the right move, made the right turn,” he says. “How it happened is we went to listen to Olivia Harrison reading her book [Came the Lightning], her poems for George. She had about 50 people there, and one of them was T Bone, who I’ve bumped into many times since the Seventies.” He asked Burnett to write him a song, but got more than he bargained for. “He sent a country track over. I said, ‘All right, so I’m going to make a country EP now?’ But then he came into town and we sat around and I thought, oh, maybe he could produce an album on me. I said, ‘Well, how many songs have we got?’ And he had them in his pocket — nine.”

“I can’t help myself,” Burnett admits. “He invited me to write a song for him, and look what happened. I wrote a good long song for him.” But after their success with Look Up, the tunes just kept flowing. “It’s tremendous fun to write for his voice, for his spirit,” Burnett says. “He’s one of the most recognizable voices in the world, so his voice is in your head with every word you write. It becomes very easy. It’s like guide rails that you can just chase, to follow down a path.”

Ringo’s always had country in his soul. “Well, if I talk like that, it’s because of where I come from,” he says, exaggerating his Liverpudlian accent. “That’s very fooking country, innit? But growing up in Liverpool, we were blessed because it was a port. The ships would go to America and then come back and they’d have all the records, country and blues. Liverpool was like the capital of what’s happening now in America. The boys would bring in all these records. And after three days, they’d spent all their money, so they sold the records. That’s how it was.”

When the Beatles fell apart in 1970, Ringo made the country album Beaucoups of Blues, with the pedal-steel legend Pete Drake, who’d played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. But instead of a superstar country-rock trip, Ringo went to Music Row to do it their way. “Pete Drake was the country guy who put it together,” Ringo says. “We were working in the studio with George Harrison, and I sent my car to get him at Heathrow. He said, ‘Hey, is that your car, hoss?’ He called me ‘hoss!’ ‘I see you like country music,’ because I had a lot of cassettes in the car. ‘You should come out to Nashville and make a country record.’ I said, ‘A month in Nashville, could I deal with that?” He said, ‘What? Nashville Skyline took two days!’”

Sure enough, the Nashville studio cats banged out Beaucoups of Blues fast. “I flew in and the first morning we picked five songs, recorded them in the day, then finished them at night. The next day, five more songs, first the band then me, so we did the album in two days. Takes you two days to plug in now.”

But Ringo and T Bone took care not to make Long Long Road a retro trip. Like Look Up, it’s full of fresh blood. “It’s Been Too Long” features vocals from Tuttle and Jarosz. “Ringo’s sung only a few duets in his life,” Burnett says. “But two of them have been with Molly Tuttle. They sound beautiful together. I love Annie Clark [St. Vincent] from Dallas; she’s a soul sister. Sheryl Crow, such an amazing woman. They’re for-real artists, and Ringo’s a for-real artist, so I wanted to put other people with him.”

That’s the way Starr has always preferred to operate, as a team player. “It works for me,” he says. “I just love to play. I’ve got a lot of grandkids, and three of them are drummers. I’ve played on a lot of people’s records over the last ten years. I put my stuff on, send it back, and I say, ‘Use me or lose me!’ It may not be what they wanted, but anyway, not many of them have losed me.”

He’s heading back out on the road with his All-Starr Band, which has kept touring with a rotating cast since 1990. “The audience and I, we know each other,” he says. “I know they love me and they know I love them, so we can have some fun. I tell the band, ‘We’ve got to stay up.’ And that’s what we do.”

We should all have this man’s energy level. “Well, you’ve got to eat more broccoli,” he says. “All the good things about me, I blame broccoli for. So now I say, peace and love and broccoli.”

His plainspoken voice sounds reflective on Long Long Road — it’s almost certainly the best album ever made by an 85-year-old. It was recorded in Nashville and L.A., with six Burnett tunes and three by Starr. (“Give me a bit of a melody and a chord and I can write songs,” Ringo says with pride.) He also does a vintage 1950s tune by rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins, one of the Beatles’ biggest heroes, titled “I Don’t See Me in Your Eyes Anymore.” Ringo sings it with the stoic sense of fate that’s always haunted his singing ever since classics like “It Don’t Come Easy” or “Photograph.”

All four Fabs were deeply immersed in country sounds. “Look, the Beatles, if they came out today, would be called an Americana band,” Burnett says. “All the way through, George Harrison played a Chet Atkins Country Gentleman guitar, and he played Carl Perkins-style finger-picking, which all goes back to Arnold Schultz, who taught Bill Monroe. Bill was the mandolin player in Arnold Shultz’s band and his Uncle Pen was the fiddle player.”

But Ringo was the most twangful of the lads. Before he even joined the Beatles, he played in a Liverpool skiffle combo called the Texans. “His drumming feel is very much a Texas feel,” says Burnett, a son of Fort Worth. “It’s a swing-time feel like Milton Brown and the Brownies.” Ringo’s always had the Lone Star State in his sound, as well as a lot of New Orleans. “He’s got a similar kind of intensity that Earl Palmer had, the drummer who played on all those Little Richard records. ‘Baby Don’t Go,’ on the new album, has a very New Orleans feel, very second-line. But the way he does it, it comes out completely original.”

Long Long Road reaches back to some of his earliest Americana influences. “On this record, we’ve done a Carl Perkins song,” Ringo says. “I hadn’t heard ‘I Don’t See Me in Your Eyes Anymore’ before. He writes in the way I love to sing.”

Singing the Perkins tune was the moment that brought Ringo’s entire musical journey full circle. “The first two songs I ever recorded with the Beatles were both Carl Perkins songs. And it’s like, we’re back to Carl again. That’s how it is. I mean, I don’t sit here and make the big plan. I just say yes to something, and it unfolds as we go along.” For Ringo, it’s still simple as that.