What would you do if you were the retired fourth member of the most famous band ever to exist? Kick back in Beverly Hills? Think about what a great life you’d had? Occasionally knock out an album using a relatively limited vocabulary and 3.5 of the best chords on god’s green earth?
You and Ringo Starr both. That’s what’s abundantly clear from his 20th – yes, 20th – solo album, Look Up, which sounds like a cheerful trundle through the sunny outback of the US from the perspective of, well, someone from Liverpool. So far, so what-it-says-on-the-tin; Ringo has been the subject of a significant amount of mockery as the least creative Beatle and famously not even the band’s best drummer – but he has also always brushed it off with nonchalant cool and ridden high on his reputation as the “king of feel”.
He wasn’t the most technically proficient drummer in the biz, but he sat back on the grooves and gave the Beatles their chugging beats, understated tempos and perfectly tender pulse. At age 84, that’s exactly what he’s still doing: what Look Up lacks in sophistication, variety and imagination, it compensates for in feel – returning to country music, with the help of producer and co-writer T Bone Burnett, for the first time since his 1970 album Beaucoups of Blues.
Ringo does not push the boat out lyrically: he rhymes “love” with “love”, “you” with “you”, and occasionally pushes the stodgy and mundane (“Live to fight another day / Good things are gonna come your way”) towards the lazy and nonsensical (“Everything flies / Like a bird in the skies”). Like any nostalgic old rocker should, he laments past lovers on the baleful ballad “Time On My Hands” and the looping ditty “Rosetta” (“Rosetta / It’s been a long long road”, he sings, because why think of another word when you could just use the same one again?).
Despite these wistful moments, the overriding impression is one of sunny positivity – on “String Theory”, Ringo sings of how everything comes back to love, how “everything beams”, and “everything sings”. Musically, the album maintains the same tone throughout – twanging banjos, soulful harmonicas and a bit of a stomp – and soothes you into what you can only imagine is the pace of Ringo’s own life out there in his California mansion, sunglasses firmly on, chilled sparkling water tap neatly installed by a polite tradesman in uniform, and 12 different variations of legal marijuana twinkling in the medicine cabinet. “We will make what’s tangled come unwound,” he sings on “Never Let Me Go”, probably the most sophisticated lyric on the record – you sense that, for Ringo, everything is very much unwound already.
Look Up is given a little spice by a few choice collaborations: the 31-year-old country singer Molly Tuttle features several times, as does the 32-year-old guitarist Billy Strings; their vocal harmonies add charm and loosen up the record where things threaten to get claggy.
And although these features, along with Burnett’s heavy influence, make the whole thing feel like it could basically be any mid-level country album, Ringo’s vocal is still unique, evocative and of a time. Ultimately it’s difficult to feel anything but nostalgic and, to put it bluntly, patriotic when you hear any contemporary work from the Beatles’ remaining two members. Ringo’s latest record isn’t one for the ages, but it ticks along happily enough, just like him.
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