“The long and winding road is more than a song / Tomorrow never knows what goes on…” croons 85-year-old Ringo Starr on Choose Love, the lead single from his new album, Long Long Road. It’s his second solid rockabilly record (both written and produced by industry veteran T Bone Burnett) in two years, slotting sweet and corny lyrics over polished country gee-taws with a few gently psychedelic flourishes around the edges.
Although never the greatest vocalist in the Beatles, Ringo has always conveyed an avuncular warmth and easygoing, storytelling style that works as well in country songs as it did when he was narrating Thomas the Tank Engine on television.
And country was always Ringo’s thing. As a teenager, the boy born Ritchie Starkey in Dingle, Liverpool, was so determined to be a country singer that he applied to emigrate to Texas (the home of his country blues idol, Lightnin’ Hopkins). At 19, he rebranded himself as “Ringo Starr” to sound more like a western artist. The Beatles derailed his yee-haw ambitions, but he remained the Fab Four’s resident saloon bar singer alongside his drumming duties, singing lead vocals on their 1964 cover of Tennessee rockabilly star Carl Perkins’s Honey Don’t and 1965 version of Johnny Russell’s Act Naturally. I’ve got a soft spot for Ringo’s second solo album, Beaucoups of Blues (1970), on which he gave his love of country music free rein.
Burnett, the 78-year-old songwriter and producer behind Ringo’s latest foray into the Nashville sound, is a tech-shunning professional who believes “we live in an age of music for people who don’t like music”. As a guitarist he played in Bob Dylan’s band on the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue tour in the mid-1970s, but is now best known for his work on Hollywood film soundtracks (2000’s O Brother, Where Art Thou?, 2005’s Walk the Line).
On Long Long Road Ringo is surrounded by world-class, old-time country and rock musicians (with lovely backing vocals by Molly Tuttle, Sheryl Crow and St Vincent) as he trots through the well-crafted, vintage-style songs, walloping his sticks and wallowing in his deep, swaggering and only faintly weathered voice.
There’s a spunkily plucked upright bass on Baby Don’t Go (whose dark bluesy guitars take the edge off the cheesy rhyme scheme of “later / equator / interrogator”); doo-wop and a heat-hazy pedal steel backing on I Don’t See Me in Your Eyes Anymore; and trippy, back-looping flutes fluttering around the hook of Choose Love. The title track (the only one on which “Richard Starkey” gets a co-writing credit) opens with some Beach Boys-indebted a cappella vocals by Daniel Tashian (who helped bring the stoner cowboy vibes to Kacey Musgraves’s 2018 Grammy-winning album Golden Hour) and includes a spoken-word section in which Ringo leans in to the mic to offer listeners some advice. “Don’t be attacked by your thoughts / Let them come in and let them go,” he intones.
There’s nothing challenging about this record. But it offers undemanding companionship, toe-tapping tunes and a timeless reminder that all you need is love.
Long Long Road is out now, via Universal