Ringo Starr’s Twangy Turn

BY BARRY MAZOR

The former Beatle highlights his love of country music on an album produced by T Bone Burnett

One aspect of the Beatles’ music that attracted British radio and record labels in their early days was its detectable country tinge. All four were fond of American country and rockabilly, yet it would be drummer Ringo Starr, the final band recruit, who’d be most closely associated with those genres. His performances of Carl Perkins’s “Honey Don’t,” the Johnny Russell-written Buck Owens hit “Act Naturally,” and his original, “Don’t Pass Me By,” solidified the connection. After the band broke up, his second solo LP would be 1970’s “Beaucoups of Blues,” all country and recorded in Nashville.

Most of his work since has been in pop and rock, but now, at age 84, he’s returned to twang territory with an all-new album, “Look Up” (Lost Highway, Jan.

10). It’s a surprising, revealing delight, notably different from anything he’s done before.

Last century, the band often assigned him country songs because of some particular assets—his famed locked-in rhythm, his amiability and charm—and he could get a story told, even about yellow submarines and garden-variety octopuses. His vocal range, however, seemed limited. Similar pluses and minuses added up to country superstardom for Ernest Tubb and Johnny Cash, so near-patter rhythm songs, like many they’d sung, were Ringo’s. T Bone Burnett, who produced the new album, with some added production help from Daniel Tashian and Bruce Sugar, wrote or co-wrote nine of its 11 tracks, built on his belief that Mr. Starr had it in him to be a melodious and moving, if rarely tested, crooner. It was a good call. Such tuneful country ballads in the set as “Time on My Hands” and “String Theory” are smoothly and touchingly delivered. The album is able to incorporate those easily, along with harder country and country-rock sounds.

In “Come Back,” with fiddle, mandolin and resonator guitar behind him, Ringo is missing a love who has left, confiding “I walk alone / And feel you gone / Through streets of stone / Until the dawn.” Mr. Starr’s plucky whistling sets off the tune, and registers as just right. The celebrated sequence in 1964’s “A Hard Day’s Night” that had him walking alone along a river, lonesome but resilient as a country-song hero, helped cement his image and surely had a conscious or unconscious role in Mr.

Burnett’s creation of this song. The background vocals are by the rootsmusic- friendly indie pop group Lucius.

The album, recorded partly in Nashville, partly in Los Angeles, abounds with guest performers young enough to be his grandchildren, and with Mr. Burnett’s prominence in Americana music, a number of them—including Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle and the Larkin Poe duo—come from the countrified end of that field. Such mainstream veterans as Alison Krauss, Billy Swan, Paul Franklin, Stuart Duncan and Mickey Raphael contribute as well.

Mr. Starr has not been known for vocal pairings, but that changes here, as he warbles along agreeably with Ms. Tuttle, pledging to love everywhere and at all times in the upbeat “Can You Hear Me Call.” Like most tracks in the set, it began by having Ringo lay in the drum beat, which the instrumentalists then built on, and the vocals were added last. The songs were clearly written with the centrality of the rhythm in mind, making them all the more his own. They also well reflect his time of life and the loving, accepting attitudes that have made so many find him lovable. The poignant “I Live For Your Love” (written by Mr. Burnett along with Mr. Swan) addresses age, time and fame directly: “I don’t live in the future / I don’t live in the past . . . I live in the moment / I live in the now.”

The catchy title song alludes indirectly to some of the harder struggles he’s carried on through, such as going sober in 1988: “You had the blues / But you forgot ’em . . .

Up above your head / Where the music plays / There’s a light that shines.”

The sweet and inspirational closer, “Thankful,” with a harmony vocal from Ms. Krauss, is an original written by Mr. Starr and his longtime producer buddy Bruce Sugar. It expresses contentment and, yes, thankfulness for his current life, and his wife, and his home in California.

I venture that many around the world will be thankful for this charming, late-in-life return to a genre for which he’s always had a knack and affection.

Mr. Mazor reviews roots and country music for the Journal.