Ringo Starr Gets Back in Touch with His Country Side on Look Up

Released last Friday, Starr’s newest album, Look Up, is his first country record since Beaucops, as well as his first full-length release since 2019. In the last five-plus years, Starr has pumped out an onslaught of good-hearted but forgettable, cloying pop EPs (did “Teach Me to Tango” make its way onto any of your playlists? What about “Let’s Change the World”? Yeah, didn’t think so), so the announcement of a new country album precipitated the highest hopes we’ve had in quite a while for a Starr release. Look Up is no seam-ripping genre reconfiguration, but that’s just fine. It’s a sincerely spirited and thoroughly listenable album, certainly Starr’s best in decades. For the first time in years, Starr has saddled up and taken hold of the reins. It’s a joy to witness.

Look Up is a smorgasbord of tried-and-true country music archetypes: There are lovesick blues laments carried through weeping pedal steel guitar loops, Southern-fried rock ’n’ roll jaunts, stripped-back numbers charting lessons learned and wisdom gained along the road. Through it all, Starr gets by with a little help from his friends—all but two tracks feature names from the upper echelon of modern country, Americana and bluegrass, including Alison Krauss, Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Larkin Poe’s Rebecca and Megan Lovell, and Lucius. And no small amount of credit is due to storied producer, musician and songwriter T Bone Burnett, who produced the album and has songwriting credits on nine of its 11 songs. Starr’s voice is never outshone by those of his collaborators; his supporting players’ backing harmonies are soft and understated, lending his soulful, if limited, lilt just the right amount of depth. Starr colors his musings on life and love with a warm croon that scrawls just outside of the lines of what’s in tune, performing with the pathos (you hear the lack of conviction scratch his voice as he sighs, “I’m over her now,” on rueful post-breakup ballad “Time On My Hands”) and playfulness (“Come Back” begins and ends with character-building, lonesome cowboy whistling; you get the sense Starr’s cracking himself up as he throws his voice out, reels it back in and ad-libs on the key-clunking “You Want Some”) that make classic country so enduringly beloved.

While an undemanding record that never strays far from paths well-trodden, Look Up has unmistakably received the Starr treatment. Starr’s relentless “peace and love” credo is woven throughout the tracklist, even appearing verbatim on the album’s closing ode, “Thankful”: “Thankful for the stars above, hoping for more peace and love,” Starr and Krauss harmonize, their voices sparkling with earnestness. On recent releases, similar Starr-isms have landed as total groaners, sounding more obligatory than heartfelt, but here—given space to breathe in open, rustic soundscapes—the ultimate profoundness of Starr’s simple philosophy becomes starkly, poignantly clear. “I Live For Your Love” is especially powerful: Backed by Tuttle’s wispy harmonies and a delicately fingerpicked melody, Starr sings the titular refrain at a deliberate pace, letting his voice bend beneath the weight of each word. 

It’s difficult to not be touched by this purely wrought love, as well as Starr’s decades-long commitment to it—he did, after all, tenure in the band that sang the word 613 times throughout their discography. Love remains his musical compass throughout Look Up: He deems it the “higher power” on the uplifting title track, which itself features a delightfully Beatlesque backwards-sounding guitar interlude. On penultimate offering “String Theory,” he exalts in every little thing around him bending, ascending, beaming and streaming into love. Yes, there are more ambitious, more cerebral new country albums out there. But you can’t deny that every string plucked and word sung on Look Up—a very, very welcome return to form—is full of heart.

Anna Pichler is a freelance writer and undergraduate English Literature major attending The Ohio State University.  Her work has appeared in publications including Paste, The Line of Best Fit, and Atwood Magazine.