Let’s start with something that I’m not proud of but feels important to disclose up front. Last spring, I was interviewing Ringo Starr at the Sunset Marquis hotel, in West Hollywood, when I committed an embarrassing breach of journalistic ethics: As we were wrapping up, I asked Starr if he would pose for a photo with me.
“Or is that grossly unprofessional?” I asked, trying to come off as sheepish and apologetic.
Starr smirked.
“No, no, everybody’s unprofessional,” he said. “Don’t feel special.”
He moved next to me and flashed a compulsory peace sign as his publicist snapped our photo. “Everybody does it,” she said, and then handed me a white “peace and love” bracelet as a parting gift. Starr flashed another peace sign—a double this time.
Okay, end of disclosure. From here on, this will be a sober and detached treatment of a seminal figure in the history of popular music. (Also: The photo can be viewed on my Instagram.)
Ringo Starr is 84 years old and has lived quite an extraordinary life. I realize I am late to this story.
He is among the most scrutinized, fetishized, analyzed, and catechized people in history. I admit to feeling out of my depth, if this was not already clear. Usually, I write about politics. I am not accustomed to interacting with Beatles. As opposed to, say, congressmen.
That first day I met him, Starr had a new record to promote—a solo record, it still feels necessary to say. I had been granted a brief slot on his schedule around the release of Crooked Boy, a four-track collection that features the Strokes’ guitarist Nick Valensi. Starr had a packed interview dance card, with a procession of podcasters, YouTubers, and other species that didn’t exist when he and his Liverpool mates first started doing this, back when America’s chief influencer was Ed Sullivan.
Starr greeted me with a light fist bump, in keeping with his hypervigilance about avoiding germs.
“You might be one of the most-interviewed people in the world,” I felt the need to say.
“I am,” he confirmed.
I wondered how I could make this interesting. “Well, just make it short,” Starr suggested, as we headed out onto the patio adjacent to his suite.
“So, how short?” I asked. “Like, three minutes, two minutes?”
“You can have the whole three!” Starr said, and then punctuated his sentence, as he punctuates many of his sentences, with a dry and devilish giggle. Four quick “hah”s jackhammered in succession. He tends to speak in quips, toggling between his two dominant modes, seen-it-all sarcasm and glib nonchalance.
Born Richard Starkey, he became Sir Richard Starkey when he was knighted in 2018. I asked his excellency whether I should address him as “Ringo” or “Richard” (or “Richie,” as intimates call him). “You’ll call me Ringo, because I don’t know you,” he said. “A-hah-hah-hah-hah.”
“My family don’t call me that,” he added.
After a few minutes, the publicist started gesturing in my direction. I feared this was the universal “wrap it up” sign, but no, false alarm (she was just trying to get a photographer’s attention). “This is longer than three minutes, you know,” Starr took the opportunity to observe, affecting a sneer. Or maybe he was not affecting it.
Starr looks remarkably well maintained for his age. This is a testament to the preservative power of his fitness regimen, strict sobriety, a vegetarian diet, and lots of hair dye. He is also one of those rare figures whose face has been such a fixture of our cultural lives for so long that his actual, three-dimensional presence in front of you elicits a double take. Is this the genuine cargo or some wiry wisp of a Ringo impersonator?
It feels perfectly suitable to describe him as “looking exactly like Ringo Starr” and expect to be understood. He has the shaped beard, the little red shades, and a peace-sign pendant on a necklace. He appears just as he has in countless pop-art pieces and wax museums, and that Simpsons episode in which Starr, playing himself, turns out to be Marge’s artistic muse.
Everyone scurrying in and out of Ringo’s suite looks famous, or almost famous. They include a swarm of well-wishers and maybe some actual friends whom Starr has gotten by with a little help from. I was struck by how Starr’s presence arouses giddiness even in other rock stars. Valensi told me that when people hear that he worked with Starr, they tend to transform into elated teenagers. “Everybody who I tell that to is just so phenomenally either excited for me, or is baffled, and kind of questioning, How did that happen? ” he said. “My wife and my mom, and my sisters, and even close friends who are musicians—everybody just kind of wants to know what the whole thing was like.”
People who spotted Starr moving through the Sunset Marquis kept shouting out “Peace and love” at him. This of course has been Starr’s personal mantra, greeting, and aloha for most of his post-Beatles decades.
“Peace and love, peace and love,” Starr said back to a cluster of onlookers, sounding cheerfully bored. At one point, I watched Starr pause and puff out his cheeks into an ostentatious deep breath. I imagine that’s one of the hassles of immortality: It tends to go on forever.
I have always been a Ringo guy. This was true long before the Fab Four were reduced to an antique duo of Starr and Paul McCartney, now 82. Starr had seven straight top-10 singles after the Beatles broke up, and those early solo tracks were among the first pop songs I remember hearing on the radio when I was a kid. “It Don’t Come Easy” was released in 1971, when I was 6, and played in heavy rotation on the local pop station, WRKO-AM, Boston. It was one of my first favorite songs.
Starr always seemed like the friendliest and most life-size of the four Beatles. The others felt less accessible than the droopy-eyed drummer with the cartoon-cowboy name and childlike tunes. Ringo was yellow submarines and octopus gardens, the mascot little brother, despite being the eldest Beatle, and the best at flittering above the feuds that afflicted the trio of geniuses around him.
Starr was the fastest to comic relief and most averse to pretension in any form. “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés,” he says in Richard Lester’s 1964 comedy, A Hard Day’s Night, after a stagehand has accused Starr of being “rather arbitrary” for not letting him touch his drum kit. I latched on to this line immediately. In high school, when certain highfalutin friends would try out their fancy SAT words, I would tell them, “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés.” (Admittedly, this itself was rather arbitrary on my part.)
“He’s the most sympathetic of all the Beatles,” T Bone Burnett, the legendary producer and guitarist, told me. When I spoke with him, Burnett had just produced a new Starr record, a country album called Look Up, which came out in January and has since become one of the biggest hits of his solo career. “Nobody has generated more goodwill than Ringo,” Burnett added. “Not a single person in the world.”
Clearly, this is hyperbole. Starr has had his moments of tribulation. As the Beatles were reaching their collective wits’ end in 1968, he up and left the band while the others kept on recording what would become The White Album. It was the first time a Beatle had quit, though as the journalist Rob Sheffield writes in Dreaming the Beatles, “It later became one of their favorite pastimes.” Ringo decamped to Sardinia, and somehow the press didn’t hear about it. McCartney took over on drums for “Dear Prudence,” a fact that would remain a secret for nearly two decades.
For the most part, though, Starr is depicted as an unfailingly positive force within the band. Starr, in Sheffield’s summation, is “the guy who holds it together because he can get along with the high-strung divas up front.”
This idea of Ringo as a source of solace, lowerer of temperatures, and defuser of tensions resonated with me. I spent much of 2024 covering the bleak spectacle of the U.S. presidential campaign. Nothing was making sense, and everywhere I went, people seemed stuck in rival camps of resentment. If “peace and love” had been on the ballot, it would have lost in a landslide.
But here was Ringo, still banging around. It felt like a small but significant win for humankind, and one to be celebrated as often as possible.
On July 7, I went to Starr’s birthday gala in Beverly Hills, where celebrities of varying wattages (Fred Armisen, the Eagles’ Joe Walsh) wished him well. Starr has turned his birthday into an international celebration of peace and love; at noon local time, Ringo fans in 34 nations exclaimed “Peace and love,” as did NASA astronauts aboard the International Space Station. I attended events tied to the release of Starr’s two new records, and two concerts by his long-running “Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band.” Throughout, the Ringo habitat stayed blissfully sealed off from Donald Trump, Joe Biden, national reckonings, crises of democracy, and things of that nature.
On the rare occasions when politics did intrude, the context was fittingly fun-loving. “I agree!” Starr announced last fall, as he held up a RINGO FOR PRESIDENT 2024 placard that he had grabbed from a fan in the audience during a show in Washington, D.C.
If only. Instead, Starr would be my roving ambassador of joy and amity in an America that felt starved of such things.
“I can’t force you to be peaceful and loving; I can only say, ‘Peace and love,’ ” Starr told me. But how wonderful it would be, I replied, if his “peace and love” birthday festivities kept growing and growing. The event might outlive him, and July 7 could be a certified international holiday. One day a week should be dedicated to peace and love, Starr countered: “I want Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Peace and Love, Thursday, Friday.” (Naturally, this would require eight days a week.)
Starr has a gift for coining offbeat phrases. His fellow Beatles referred to them as “Ringo-isms.” The phrases might sound askew at first, and don’t always track precisely. But something about them is just right. They fill a gap in the language you hadn’t realized was there.
Starr once described a particularly grueling Beatles session as being a hard day’s night. This presumably was meant to convey a hybrid sense of fatigue, relief, and satisfaction. Everyone who heard him seemed to know just what he meant. Soon enough, it would be a song, a movie title, and a universal refrain.
McCartney and John Lennon were mesmerized by these nonsensical yet lyrical coinages. Starr has said that Lennon would follow him around, pencil at the ready, “waiting to hear what I’d say next.” His quirky phraseology was unpredictable and did not keep normal hours. Suddenly, inspiration would strike. How to capture Father McKenzie’s abject isolation in “Eleanor Rigby”? Say he’s “darning his socks in the night when there’s nobody there.” That was all Ringo.
(Eight days a week has been credited as a Ringo-ism, but Starr told me the phrase came from an overworked cabdriver, who said it to McCartney. “At one time I did want to take credit for it,” he admitted. “I said all those other lines.”)
I first learned about Ringo-isms last spring while sitting in a Beverly Hills Starbucks cramming for my first meeting with Starr. A few months earlier, he had done an interview with AARP the Magazine on the occasion of yet another record, the EP Rewind Forward, which had come out in October 2023. The title track is a great and uplifting song. I especially loved the concept of “rewind forward,” a contemporary Ringo-ism that is also something of a mental strategy for him.
Starr explained that when he’s in despair, he tries to transport himself to a happier time in order to break his sadness. “If I’m in a bad space, rewind to the good space you were in,” he said. “Like yesterday, an hour ago, or last year. And bring it forward.” Starr said he loved the term rewind forward as soon as it popped into his head and out of his mouth. “When I said it—like hard day’s night—it made no sense,” he told me. But soon enough, it made perfect sense. “Just, hey, bring it forward,” he said.
I instantly appreciated the notion of “rewind forward.” One of the most powerful examples of this in my own life, in fact, involves Ringo Starr.
It was the summer of 1991, and I was going through a brutally difficult time. My little brother, Phil, had just died after a terrible car crash and a six-year ordeal in a coma. I was 26; living in Cambridge, Massachusetts; depressed as hell; and not able to sleep, write, or do much of anything. Finally, a shrink prescribed me an antidepressant—something far less common and more stigmatized in those days, and I didn’t dare tell a soul. As the pharmacist at the crowded CVS in Harvard Square reviewed my prescription, he said to me in a very loud voice, “You will be taking this to treat clinical depression, right?” I cannot emphasize how loud this was.
I stood there mortified, while everyone in the long line behind me cracked up. As did I, after a few seconds. It was my first moment of pure lightness in months. I will always remember that episode, as well as what was playing over the CVS speakers at just that moment: “It Don’t Come Easy,” that great Ringo tune about persevering through darkness.
Looking back on that period in my 20s, it now feels less a dreary memory than something to celebrate—a testament to the miracle of survival. Whenever I hear “It Don’t Come Easy,” it inspires an odd nostalgia for that moment in CVS when brightness peeked through. The song offers a chance to connect with an old, surmounted pain.
Starr began working on “It Don’t Come Easy” in the late 1960s, as tensions within the Beatles were reaching their full boil. He has spoken of the song in terms of his own self-doubt. The other three were much more accomplished songwriters; how would he fare on his own? “When I first started writing, I would play the songs to the boys, and they would all be on the floor laughing their asses off,” Starr told me. “Because I had just rewritten someone else’s song. I just changed the words, but it had the same melody. And so I had to get out of that.”
Starr had always been set apart from the other three, and not just onstage, as drummers often are. Although all four Beatles had endured gritty Liverpool upbringings, Starr was a true vanquisher of long odds, overcoming a childhood steeped in poverty and chronic illness—“a Dickensian chronicle of misfortune,” as the Beatles biographer Bob Spitz has called it.
At age 6, little Richie Starkey contracted a ghastly case of peritonitis. “They went in for my appendix, but, too late, it had exploded; all the poison was in my body,” Starr told me. “And they did actually say to my mother—three times they said to her—‘He’ll be dead in the morning.’ And, hey, here I am.” He spent several months in the hospital before he recovered. He then contracted tuberculosis, endured another long hospitalization, and nearly died of boredom until one fateful day.
“The teacher came with percussive maracas and triangles,” he told me. “We weren’t doing school, so we learned to play a percussive band. And I got a drum, and that was the moment. I hit that drum.” He was 13. “I only wanted to be a drummer from then on.”
This is another reason I’m a Ringo guy—he projects a kind of playful pathos. His hardships are never far from the surface, which makes him feel approachable, perhaps more so than he intends.
A few minutes after I’d met Starr for the first time, I heard myself telling him the story about depressed 20-something me hearing “It Don’t Come Easy” in CVS. This was, I realize, a bit of an overshare right out of the gate. “Every time I hear that song now, I feel joy,” I told him. Starr said nothing at first. “But enough about me,” I said to fill the silence. He did not respond for a second, which felt more like an hour. Why is this man I just met baring his soul to me? I imagined him thinking.
“No, but it’s a cool thing,” he finally said.
He gave me an empathetic look, the distinctly Ringo eyes.
country album has been one of the biggest hits of his long solo career. (Dina Litovsky for The Atlantic)
Starr often conveys a sense of not wanting to linger or drag out an obligation. Make it short. T Bone Burnett told me about a listening party for Look Up that Starr hosted in L.A. “He said, ‘Well, it’s been wonderful having you all listen to the record. Over there is the food,’ ” Starr told his guests. “ ‘And over there is the door.’ ” But he also has a knack for snapping into a quiet mode of comforting contemplation.
“I think it goes back to that extraordinary scene in A Hard Day’s Night,” Burnett told me. The band members spend much of the movie being swarmed by fans and press, chased by girls, and cloistered in their hotel room (with Starr receiving by far the biggest stack of fan mail).
At one point, Starr grabs a camera and walks off on his own to experience the world. He attempts, with mixed success, to avoid detection. “He’s quiet; he’s thoughtful; he’s sensitive,” Burnett told me. “You could feel in the film there’s all this madness around him. But here’s this very thoughtful cat. And I think it goes back to that. And there’s something—and you can feel—there’s a hurt in him that he wears very gracefully.”
At various times, both Lennon and George Harrison spoke of being in the Beatles as a burden. Starr, by contrast, always seemed like the Beatle most fully grounded in gratitude. He was lucky to have survived his merciless Liverpool youth, the madness of being in the Fab Four, years of addiction to drugs and alcohol after the band’s dissolution, even the apparently quite dangerous status of having been a Beatle at all. (Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan in 1980; Harrison was brutally stabbed by a paranoid schizophrenic who invaded his home in 1999.)
Starr has not always hidden his annoyance at the hassles of his hyper-fame. In 2008, he released an exasperated video begging fans to stop sending him stuff in the mail to sign. (“Nothing!” he railed. “Peace and love.”) For the most part, though, he has carried himself like someone who won a long-shot bet and has been playing with house money ever since. He seems eternally grateful to have been tapped for the World’s Greatest Band, or any band.
“I’m a band guy,” Starr has said, often. “I need a group of guys,” he told me. “I need the bass player and the guitar players.” It’s not like the drummer can go out and perform by himself.
Last June, I went to see Starr and His All Starr Band play the Venetian in Las Vegas. Since 1989, Starr has been playing and touring with a revolving cast of old musical buddies. The current lineup comprises seven members, all in their 60s or older, including Steve Lukather of Toto, Colin Hay of Men at Work, and Hamish Stuart of Average White Band.
Starr’s people let me show up early for sound check. I watched from the front section of an empty theater of soaring ceilings, balconies, a massive chandelier, and pale-pink seats. Starr was wearing a black tracksuit and holding a mic at center stage. “Testing, one, two, three,” he said into the mic. “Hello, Mark.” I waved a peace sign back at him and did my best to keep my composure and not turn into a giddy groupie again. I failed. “Holy shit, he knows my name,” I said, pathetically, to Starr’s publicist, who probably had just reminded him of my name, and that I existed.
After rehearsing a few more songs, including “It Don’t Come Easy,” Starr wandered over. “Hello,” he said. Fist bump. How did he like Las Vegas? I asked. His 2024 spring tour included six dates at the Venetian, of which this was the last.
“I don’t care; I’ll play anywhere,” he said. “I’ll go where they send me.”
Given the crowds, the chaos, the ad campaigns condoning venial sin, I suggested that Vegas might be one of the least peaceful and loving cities in America. Starr pointed to the empty hall. “Tonight, this space will be all peace and love,” he vowed.
I wondered why Starr was still subjecting himself to this grind. If nothing else, it illustrated how being a “band guy” remains essential to his center of gravity. “He loves musicians,” Lukather, of Toto, told me. “There’s something to be said with going through the good and the bad with people, as opposed to all by yourself. Because the highs are high and the lows are real low.”
Lukather has played guitar in the All Starr Band for 13 years. Every one of those years, he said, Starr has insisted would be the finale. “This is the last one, lads, the last one,” he says. No way, Lukather replies. Starr will get restless in a month and come running back. “Here’s the deal with the circus,” Lukather told me. “Once he joined the circus, he could never leave.”
Starr confirmed that he is a failed retiree, many times over. “I’ve had enough; I’ve done enough,” he will say. “And I get a phone call: ‘Well, we’ve got 10 gigs if you’re interested.’ ‘Okay.’ And we’re on the road again.” It’s much easier doing only 10 or 11 gigs a month, he said, compared with the 30 or so they used to do. “It still gives me time to get my rocks off and play the drums,” Starr told me. “With a band.”
Ringo’s All Starr Band shows last about two hours and feature several of his best-known solo tracks, such as “Photograph” and “Back Off Boogaloo.” The set also includes Beatles songs that Starr did vocals on (“Octopus’s Garden” and “With a Little Help From My Friends”). Interspersed throughout are songs from each of the All Starrs’ primary bands: Lukather will lead renditions of Toto’s “Africa,” and Hay will do Men at Work’s “Down Under.”
Starr wore a bright-red jacket over a black peace-sign T-shirt, and split his stage time between front-man duties and drums. He clearly preferred one role to the other. Holding a mic, Starr looks stiff. On the drums, he looks 20 years younger. Valensi, of the Strokes, has also observed how much looser he looks behind the kit. “Whatever redemption he got through his drumming as a kid, it’s still there,” he told me.
If the Beatles at Shea Stadium in ’65 was packed with shrieking teenage fans, the All Starrs at the Venetian incubated quite a different ambience about six decades later. About a third of the sold-out audience looked old enough to have been at Shea. “When I first started doing this, there were a lot of high voices: ‘We love you, Ringo,’ ” Starr said from the stage, imitating a screaming girl’s voice. “Now: ‘We love you, Ringo,’ ” he said, affecting the labored voice of an old-timer.
Forty minutes or so in, after “Yellow Submarine,” Starr leaves for a break while the others keep performing their songs. “I’m going to have a cup of tea,” he tells the audience as he heads off. On one hand, this is a bit odd, the headliner just up and leaving mid-show; what is he doing while he’s offstage? On the other hand, does this octogenarian really need to hear another rendition of Average White Band’s “Cut the Cake”? I say Ringo has paid his dues and earned his rest.
After a few minutes, Starr jogs back onstage in a fresh T-shirt and the same blazer. The first chords of “Octopus’s Garden” twang out, and the crowd goes an aging version of nuts. Everyone sings along. I sense some earnest effort in the theater to make this gathering count for more than just nostalgia.
“Peace and love! Peace and love!” a group of women screamed from behind me. They pretty much kept this up for two solid hours. It was slightly annoying, but their conviction was undeniable.
Paul McCartney was on the phone. It was late January, and I was in Greenland, reporting on Donald Trump’s inauguration from one of the foreign territories he was proposing to annex. McCartney sounded intrigued by my whereabouts, or perhaps merely amused that I was marooned there waiting out a predictably bad run of snowy weather. I asked whether he’d ever been to Greenland. “The only way would be if the plane had to stop there,” McCartney allowed. “For refueling and stuff.” He had just completed a global tour that featured 59 shows and lasted two and a half years—but no date in Nuuk. I felt a swell of pride at having found a spot on the globe that a Beatle had never been to.
Starr had joined McCartney onstage a few weeks earlier at a concert at London’s O2 arena—the last stop on McCartney’s tour. McCartney introduced him that night as “the mighty, the one and only Mr. Ringo Starr.” They played a few Beatles tracks (“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise),” “Helter Skelter”) and shared an embrace, and the stadium rocked accordingly.
Starr told me he and McCartney keep in close contact. Starr lives in Beverly Hills, where he’s owned a home since the 1990s, and McCartney resides mainly in the U.K. But they FaceTime regularly, and pop in on each other when proximity allows. “I had dinner with him on Wednesday,” Starr mentioned during our first meeting.
The Beatles have often spoken of one another as brothers. “I was an only child, and then suddenly I had three brothers,” Starr told me. He said he felt sorry for Elvis Presley, who had to go through megastardom by himself. Harrison drew this contrast as well. “There was only one Elvis,” he once said. “Nobody else knew what he felt like.” He seemed to speak with a note of pity.
Many theories have taken hold about the Beatles—about their genius, their rivalries, their time at the summit of the world. Few bands have inspired such complicated or closely studied mythology. But the truth will always reside in the exquisite space that John, Paul, George, and Ringo inhabited together.
Only the four of them can understand. And now there’s just two. Ringo and Paul, Paul and Ringo. “He’s the only one who knows,” Starr said to me of McCartney.
I asked McCartney about Starr’s remark. What, exactly, does only he know?
“Well, there’s nothing to mean by it; it’s just true,” McCartney said. “It’s just simple truth. There were four of us. The Beatles. And we worked together, we lived together, we were a Beatles sandwich.” No other soul could ever fully comprehend that sandwich.
“Nobody else,” McCartney continued. “People might have been in the room, but they weren’t really in the room. There were just four of us that knew how it felt.”
Ringo and Paul were roommates when the band went on the road. “I never really roomed with anyone,” McCartney told me. “I didn’t go to college. I had one brother—I have one brother—but after a certain age, we got our own rooms.” Bunking with Starr at that age strengthened their bond, McCartney said. “And we were in a million vans, trains, planes, cars.”
Starr’s friends tend to speak about him in a particular key of fascination. I also detect a note of protectiveness, especially against the critics who have described Starr as the band’s weakest link. The rap is that any drummer would have made it work with the Beatles. McCartney mentioned Buddy Rich, the late jazz drummer, who apparently once dismissed Starr as “adequate, no more than that.” From a technical standpoint, McCartney said, Rich might have been correct. “None of us would have passed a music exam,” he said. “None of us ever could read or write music.”
Starr’s admirers say his genius lies in something far more intuitive than the likes of Buddy Rich could appreciate. Starr says “I play to the song”; his drumming relies on feel more so than technique or training.
McCartney recalls the first time that he, Lennon, and Harrison played with Starr in front of an audience, in the early 1960s. “I remember just glancing at the other two guys, and we all had a look in our eyes,” he said. “It was one of those magical moments, you know; it was like, Shit, something just happened. ”
Then there is the matter of Starr’s extramusical contributions to the group. He was an essential figure of cohesion.
“He’s glue, you know; he’s the glue kind of thing,” McCartney told me. “We were all what you’d call ‘grammar-school kids,’ ” he continued, referring to Lennon, Harrison, and himself. “Ringo was just University of Life.” Starr barely went to school. He had his medical torments, and grew up in the “Dingle,” one of the roughest, poorest sections of Liverpool. “You can’t be trained to be like Ringo,” McCartney told me.
Starr was also older, the last to join the Beatles, and the only one who’d already played in another professional band, Rory Storm and the Hurricanes. McCartney said that all of the Beatles looked up to one another. They never dared to admit it, but it was a driving dynamic. “I think we all kind of had that,” McCartney said. “Quietly.”
Their reverence for Starr was perhaps the hardest to distill. “You’d meet Ringo, and it would cut across everything you’d ever learned,” McCartney told me. “You’d think, God, I’ve got to try to be a little more like this. This guy’s cool.” Starr would sit and assess and stay silent for long stretches. Then, periodically, he would blurt out something “that comes out of left field”—a Ringo-ism.
“He’s actually making mistakes,” McCartney said. “But he says it with such conviction that it works.” Starr would coin something like hard day’s night, and grammar-school kids would hear it and immediately want to correct the grammar. “ ‘I’ve never heard it said like that,’ ” McCartney told me. “And then it’s basically, ‘Well, I’m not sure why no one’s said that before. Because that’s the perfect phrase.’ ”
Once, McCartney told me, the Beatles were sitting in a restaurant, preparing to order. “And Ringo said, ‘I’ll have slight bread.’ ”
Slight bread?
“Slight bread, yeah,” McCartney said.
What exactly is “slight bread”?
“Well, who knows?” McCartney said. “There’s no answer to these questions. It’s just right.”
What does “normal” life look like for an 84-year-old former Beatle? I was able to ascertain some details about Starr’s day-to-day. Does he drive? (Yes.) Does he have a trainer? (Yes: three days a week, weights, yoga, pilates, treadmill.) Streaming? (“Yeah, I love TV,” he told me.) What shows?
“Well, I’m not going to plug anybody,” he said, and I withdrew the question.
Naturally, Starr is a fan of Liverpool FC of the Premier League, but also the Dallas Cowboys of the NFL. He saw me wince when he mentioned the Cowboys and asked why. “Just like everyone loves the Beatles, everyone hates the Cowboys,” I explained. Starr objected—mostly to my choice of words.
“Why would you hate them?” he wondered. “That’s a strong word, to hate. Dislike is a better word.”
Confronted with more inner-directed questions about what it’s like to be Ringo Starr, the man can be stubbornly understated. “My name is Ringo, and I play drums,” he said when he entered the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a solo artist in 2015. On the topic of how he came to join the Beatles, Starr is similarly laconic. “They wanted me to join the Beatles,” he told me. “I got this phone call, and that’s how it all happened.”
In 2022, Starr was given an honorary doctorate from the Berklee College of Music, in Boston. “I don’t have a lot to say, just ‘Thank you,’ ” he said.
“You know, I just hit them. That’s all I do. I just hit the buggers,” he added, “the buggers” being the drums. “In a way, it’s like some strange fairy tale.”
Perhaps the strangest quality of this fairy tale is that it’s still unfolding. Starr’s country collaboration with T Bone Burnett, Look Up, is one of Starr’s most successful albums in years, hitting No. 1 on the U.K.’s Official Country Artists Albums Chart and selling briskly in the U.S. as well.
Coverage of Look Up has noted that Starr is one of several pop acts who have recently made country albums, as if Starr has latched on to some new crossover fashion, chasing the likes of Beyoncé and Post Malone. But Starr sounds genuinely oblivious to the bandwagon he’s supposedly hopping on. “I know Beyoncé made a record and it was No 1,” Starr said in an interview with The Times of London. “But no, I haven’t heard it.”
In fact, Starr’s life and career have always been steeped in country music. As a boy, he loved Westerns and worshipped Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy. His early music idols were Hank Williams and Hank Snow; later, he admired Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. He dreamed of escaping the Dingle for Texas. He even wrote to the Houston Chamber of Commerce after resolving to live close to the country-blues icon Lightnin’ Hopkins. As a general rule, this was not something poor Liverpool boys aspired to do.
Burnett says he always considered Starr to be the Beatles’ resident country ambassador. He thought of him as “rockabilly.” Burnett pointed to “What Goes On,” from Rubber Soul, and “Don’t Pass Me By,” from The White Album. “Even ‘Octopus’s Garden’ is country,” Burnett told me. “It sounds like Chet Atkins playing guitar.”
Country also played an essential part in helping Starr adapt to his post-Beatles life. The withdrawal was difficult at times: eight years of manic, identity-warping hysteria and creative intensity. Then, suddenly, nothing. Starr wallowed. He drank, a lot. The plaintive strains of country music made for a fitting companion. “The wife’s left, the dog’s dead, or I need some money for the jukebox” is how Starr sums up the standard trajectory of country tunes.
“I sat in my garden, wondering what to do with myself,” Starr told me. “And get over, really, missing and playing with the other three boys. And I thought one day, I’ve got to get up.”
He talked with Pete Drake, an American producer who worked with Harrison on his album All Things Must Pass, about making a country album. Beaucoups of Blues would be Starr’s second solo release. Hearing it now, it’s striking how well suited Starr’s voice is to country singing. He sounds playfully mournful—or mournfully playful—like someone perfectly at home in the genre.
Starr has long been a casual acquaintance of Burnett’s, who has won about a million Grammys (13). In November 2022, the pair encountered each other at a reception for Olivia Harrison’s book of poems about her late husband. Starr mentioned that he was making an EP and asked Burnett if he wanted to contribute a track. Sure, Burnett said. He came back with a song, and then Starr asked for more. He sent nine, all of them country songs, figuring Starr could pick one or two. Starr said he liked them all.
Look Up is a vibrant and gentle compilation with recurring themes of despair, resilience, and, especially, gratitude. “Thankful” (with Alison Krauss), the record’s second release, is an homage to hard-won lessons and, in some ways, a countrified rendering of Starr’s post-Beatles trajectory.
His descent into alcoholism and long path to sobriety is a clear subtext. “ ‘Thankful’ is the most personal song he’s ever written,” Burnett told me. “It starts off, ‘I had it all and I started to fall,’ ” Burnett said. “It’s about being in the Beatles, and being on top of the world, being the most famous person in the world. And then being an addict.” A central figure of Starr’s recovery—and the main object of his gratitude—is his wife of more than 40 years, Barbara Bach. Together, they embraced sobriety in the late 1980s, which was around the time Starr convened the All Starr Band and resumed his touring career.
“Thankful” resonates with familiar Ringo refrains (“hoping for more peace and love”) and contains echoes of some of his signature songs (“I needed a friend to help me along”). After I listened a few times, I came to hear the song as an updated version of “It Don’t Come Easy,” conveyed by a blessed old soul, who had lived, thankfully, to sing the tale.
In the middle of January, I dropped into Nashville to watch Starr play the Ryman Auditorium, a converted downtown basilica known as the “Mother Church of Country Music.” He was joined by a lineup of country royalty: Emmylou Harris, Brenda Lee, Molly Tuttle, Billy Strings, plus a few hybrids such as Sheryl Crow and Jack White. Both the younger crowd and the grandes dames betrayed an endearingly starstruck appreciation for the Liverpool cowboy. “Oh man, this is extremely cool,” said Tuttle, the Grammy-winning bluegrass player. “I cannot think of a better way to spend my 32nd birthday than to sing one of my favorite songs,” she said, and swung into a fiddle-heavy rendition of “Octopus’s Garden.”
“Such a thrill to be playing with really one of the most amazing people that ever was, but also right now,” Crow said when she took the ancient stage. “Don’t we need this love?” she asked. Trump’s inauguration was about a week away, and for a moment, it seemed that politics might cast a shadow over the evening. Instead, Crow and Tuttle launched into a vivacious duet of “I Don’t Want to Spoil the Party.”
In my final conversation with Starr, I asked him about the title track of Look Up. He’s complained that people are always looking down—he sees them walking, eyes fixed on the pavement. “You look up, your attitude changes,” he told me. “You’re looking around.” Otherwise, “you’re just trapped in your head.” He’s been asked if there’s some religious message in the phrase: Several people have said, “ ‘Oh, you’re looking at God.’ ” But they have it wrong, Starr said. “I’m looking up at the world.”
And what does he see? As Starr has made the media rounds for Look Up, I’ve watched him get hit a couple of times with the requisite questions about our parlous political moment. “Are you worried at all?” Jimmy Kimmel asked him. “Why would I be worried?” Starr replied. He has no interest in playing the role of pundit, or sounding a note of protest.
“You can only do what you do,” Starr told me, when I took my own shot at asking him about the state of the world. “I can only do what I do.” Starr flashed me another double peace sign, which is him doing what he does. Maybe it will start something. Maybe others will follow. Who can say? As a wise man once put it, tomorrow never knows.
This article appears in the May 2025 print edition with the headline “When I’m 84.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.
