Ringo Starr, 85, Embraces Country Music on New Album Long Long Road

At a listening party in Santa Monica last week, Ringo Starr sat beside T Bone Burnett and Jeff Bridges and explained, without apology, why he still cannot double-track his own drum fills. "I can't ever double-track, I can't do it," he said. "It's a feeling to the song." That single sentence contains the entire instruction manual for six decades of great drumming, and it arrives just weeks before his new album, *Long Long Road*, drops on April 24.

The 10-track record, his 22nd studio album, will be released through Universal Music Enterprises. It is his third country and Americana album, following *Beaucoups of Blues* from 1970 and last year's *Look Up*. *Long Long Road* marks Starr's second collaboration with producer T Bone Burnett, following *Look Up*'s acclaimed Nashville run. Guest appearances include Billy Strings, Sheryl Crow, St. Vincent, Molly Tuttle, and Sarah Jarosz.

The album's first single, "It's Been Too Long," was released March 3, featuring the vocals of Molly Tuttle and Sarah Jarosz. A second track, "Choose Love," followed, described as a fresh take on a song Starr has long carried. The 10 songs include six written or co-written by Burnett, two co-written by Ringo and Bruce Sugar, and a cover of the Carl Perkins classic "I Don't See Me in Your Eyes Anymore," tying back to the first two songs Ringo recorded with the Beatles, which were also Perkins covers.

For drummers, the more interesting story is what Burnett hears in Starr's pocket. "His drumming feel is very much a Texas feel," says Burnett, a son of Fort Worth. "It's a swing-time feel like Milton Brown and the Brownies." That assessment cuts against everything a typical practice-room drummer chases: the flashy fill, the metronomic lockstep, the technical flex. Ringo's longevity runs on restraint and feel, not volume or velocity.

At the listening party, Starr explained his approach plainly: "I play in an emotional state... I play in the moment. Nobody showed me anything, I did it all by working my way through skiffle in Liverpool." That origin story carries a lesson most intermediate players miss. Where hobbyists often practice in isolation, drilling rudiments divorced from any song, Starr built his feel by playing *through* music, not around it. The groove was always in service of the lyric, never the other way.

Ringo stated: "I'm blessed to have T Bone in my life right now and working with me on these records. After we did the last record, which I love listening to, this one just sort of happened." That phrase, "just sort of happened," is either the most modest thing a working musician has ever said, or the most instructive. Consistency without rigidity, sessions that do not feel like sessions, a feel that stays elastic at 85 precisely because it was never forced into a mold.

*Look Up*, released in January 2025, earned Starr his first Top 10 on Billboard's all-genre Top Album Sales chart and his first solo number-one on the UK Official Country Chart. In February 2025, Starr made his Grand Ole Opry debut after being invited by Emmylou Harris, during the first of a two-night run at the Ryman, recorded for a two-hour special still streaming on CBS and Paramount Plus.

"That's who he is," Burnett says of Starr. "He's been a convener for a long time, and a collaborator." At 85, still upright behind the kit, still playing in the moment, still refusing to double-track a fill because it would mean lying about the feeling: *Long Long Road* is the sound of that philosophy holding.