Ringo Starr is stepping back into the world of country music.
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During a recent press conference with his All-Starr Band ahead of their tour launch, Starr revealed that he’s working on a new country EP. The project started when legendary singer/songwriter and producer T Bone Burnett sent him a song he couldn’t refuse.
“He sent me, I promise you, one of the most beautiful country songs I’ve heard in a long time,” Starr raved to American Songwriter and other media. “It’s very old school country, it’s beautiful. So I thought, ‘I’m going to make a country EP.’ A lot of my life has changed by the moment that comes into it and then I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to do that.’ So that’s what I’m doing.”
The former Beatle has been a longtime fan of the genre, so much so that he released his first solo country album, Beaucoups of Blues, in 1970. Recorded in Nashville, the album reached the Top 40 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. As a member of the Beatles, he was the lead singer on their cover of Buck Owens’ “Act Naturally” and co-wrote the country-leaning 1965 B-side, “What Goes On.”
Starr says the country EP won’t be released until 2024 after he and the All-Star Band wrap up their tour in October 2023. In the meantime, he’s working on another EP with his friend Linda Perry. The two have collaborated together before, as Perry wrote a pair of tracks for Starr’s two latest EPs, “Coming Undone,” off his 2021 EP, Change the World, as well as “Everyone and Everything” on EP3 in 2022. She also co-produced both EPs with Starr and Bruce Sugar. Starr says that Perry is now working on another EP for him where all he’ll be doing is “playing drums and singing.”
“Linda Perry is doing an EP on me because she gave me two songs in the last two EPs, we got to know each other and I love her,” he explains. “She’s just great. She said, ‘Ringo let me do it.’ And I said, ‘Okay, you do it.'”
The two also teamed up on an episode of Perry’s show on American Songwriter’s Twitch channel, The Art of…with Linda Perry, in 2021.
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