RINGO STARR´S LOOK UP: First country album in more than 50 years
"LOOK UP" is an 11-track album featuring the talents of an array of relative newcomers and established writers and performers alike, many of whom live in or have direct connections to Nashville. There are tracks written or co-written by Ringo, Burnett and Sugar, as well as legendary singer-songwriters Billy Swan and Paul Kennerly.
Nashvillian Daniel Tashian co-produced, performed on and co-wrote several songs, while breakout bluegrass stars Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle provided guitars and harmony vocals on several tracks each, and pop duos Lucius and Larkin Poe both appear on a track apiece. Regular Burnett collaborator Alison Krauss contributed harmony vocals on album closer “Thankful.”
It’s a vibrant, lush album of what Burnett refers to as “American music,” splitting the difference between classic country and a more contemporary pop-rock sound.
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And next week, rINGOStarr and his band will appear at the Mother Church of Country Music in support of the record.
As Ringo tells it, in The Beatles’ earliest days, the band
was being influenced by a swirl of American music, from Johnny Cash and
Waylon Jennings to Buddy Holly, Gene Vincent and any Motown albums they
could get their hands on.
“We did some country songs,
The Beatles, and we did Motown songs,” says Ringo. “Because, in all
honesty, at the beginning, we were like every band in Liverpool. We were
a cover band. So one night, I went to a gig, and there were three bands
on, and the other two drummers didn’t make it, and I just played with
the three bands. The curtains closed, and there’s another band, and I’m
still there, curtains close, I’m still there — because we were all
playing, really, the same songs.” The first country-rock song of all was [The Beatles’] ‘I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.’
Many of the 11 Beatles songs featuring Ringo on lead vocals are what you could call country music, or at least rockabilly — be they originals like “What Goes On” and “Don’t Pass Me By” or covers like Carl Perkins’ “Honey Don’t” and “Matchbox” and Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally.” But Ringo’s second solo album, Beaucoups of Blues — produced by legendary pedal-steel player Pete Drake over a whirlwind three days in Nashville just months after The Beatles’ dissolution — was the drummer’s last serious foray into making country music for many decades.
In the roughly 54 years since releasing Beaucoups of Blues, Starr has issued dozens of albums both as a solo artist and with his supergroup the All-Starr Band. Though Starr did team up with Owens in 1989 to revisit “Act Naturally” as a duet, the majority of his output since Beaucoups has been rock and pop music. But country music is in Starr’s musical DNA, and as an artist who’s always been willing to make an unexpected “right turn,” he followed his muse when the opportunity to make a country record presented itself.
And one Look Up song in particular speaks to Starr’s lifelong musical journey.
“I love the song ‘I Live for Your Love,’ and Ringo really loves that song,” says Burnett of the album’s fifth track, which features rich swaths of pedal steel performed by prolific sideman Paul Franklin. “Billy Swan wrote the verse — ‘I don’t live for the future, I don’t live for the past.’ … I think those two lines are really important to Ringo, because I think there’s this temptation when you have as profound a past as he does, there’s always some kind of pull back to it. I don’t think he resisted exactly, but I think he wants to live very much in the present. He’s got a full life. You know, The Beatles were maybe five years of his life when he was a kid, and it’s colored everything else he’s done. So that song’s really — I find it touching. I find his version of it very touching. I think Molly’s singing on it is beautiful. Her playing — she’s playing all that acoustic guitar stuff on it — I think her playing is really beautiful on it.”
Next week, Ringo Starr & Friends will play two nights at the Ryman in support of Look Up. Co-produced by Starr, Burnett and Van Toffler, the Jan. 14 and 15 shows will be filmed for a special and will feature performances of many Look Up songs and — according to Starr — “‘Octopus’s Garden’ in a country style.”
Starr has of course played the Ryman on a number of occasions, including as recently as September 2023, shortly after being inducted into Nashville’s Musicians Hall of Fame. But the sanctity of the venue is something he’s never taken for granted.
“To me, to be on that stage that was like the place all of the big shots of the ’50s and ’60s were playing — that was the country music I came in with,” says Ringo. “And so every time I’ve played there I had this moment: ‘Wow, I’m at the Ryman.’”
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