At 85, Ringo Starr has made one of the most quietly assured records of his fifty-plus-year solo career. Long Long Road, his twenty-second studio album, continues the country-inflected direction he pursued on last year's Look Up, and with T. Bone Burnett again producing, the results are richer, more settled, and - in a word that gets misused constantly but genuinely applies here - wise.
A Return to Roots That Never Really Left
Starr's relationship with country music is longer than many listeners remember. Beaucoups of Blues, recorded in Nashville in 1970 with producer Pete Drake, arrived just months after the Beatles' dissolution and announced, with some clarity, that Starr's solo sensibility ran closer to the American South than to Carnaby Street. It was an outlier at the time. Commercially it underperformed against the era's expectations. But the instinct behind it was genuine, and the album has aged exceptionally well.
He drifted from that sound through his most commercially successful years - the rollicking, star-studded Ringo (1973) and Goodnight Vienna (1974) drew on rock, pop, and Hollywood gloss rather than twang and heartache. Those records have their pleasures, not least in the roster of friends lending a hand. But the late-career pivot back to country, consolidated now across two albums with Burnett, feels less like a nostalgic detour and more like a correction to course.
What Burnett Brings to the Table
T. Bone Burnett is one of American music's most discerning producers - a figure whose work spans the Coen Brothers' soundtracks, Alison Krauss and Robert Plant's Raising Sand, and decades of roots-adjacent recordings that trust the song over the production. Here, he co-wrote six of the album's tracks with Starr, an unusual degree of creative investment. The thing is, that collaborative depth shows.
Burnett has a particular gift for calibrating space - knowing when silence inside a recording does more work than another instrument. On Long Long Road, that restraint frames Starr's voice rather than competing with it. And Starr, in turn, sounds like a man with nothing left to prove, which is precisely the condition that produces the most interesting performances.
The cover of "I Don't See Me in Your Eyes Anymore" - originally recorded by Carl Perkins in 1959, one of Starr's abiding influences from Liverpool's early rock-and-roll infatuation with American music - exemplifies this. It's a spare, melancholy piece. Starr doesn't overreach. The slight Scouse lilt that inflects his country phrasing doesn't read as incongruous; it reads as honest. He sounds like himself, in a genre that rewards exactly that.
The Weight of Accumulated Time
There's a line in "Choose Love" - a duet with St. Vincent that updates a song Starr originally released in 2005 - that lands differently in 2025 than it would have twenty years ago: "The long and winding road is more than a song." It's a wink, clearly, but it's also something else. A man in his eighty-sixth year invoking that particular phrase carries biographical freight that no younger artist could manufacture.
This is what late-career recordings, when they work, can do that early recordings cannot. Youth in music trades on possibility and projection. Age, at its best, trades on accumulation - on the sense that the singer has actually traveled the distance the lyrics describe. Starr, whatever the pop-cultural caricature might suggest, has traveled considerable distance. The Beatles' disintegration. The losses of Lennon and Harrison. Decades of navigating fame's longer, stranger aftermath.
The title track, which draws on Hank Williams' cadences with Sheryl Crow on backing vocals, makes this explicit without belaboring it. "Don't be attacked by your thoughts," Starr sings. "Let them come, let them go." It could read as a bumper sticker. Delivered here, with this production and this voice, it doesn't.
Why This Record Matters Beyond the Fanbase
The broader cultural point is worth making plainly: albums like Long Long Road are increasingly rare not because older artists lack the capability, but because the commercial architecture of contemporary music doesn't reward them. Streaming metrics favor youth demographics. Playlists optimize for familiarity and novelty simultaneously, a combination that tends to exclude artists over sixty regardless of quality.
That Starr - with Burnett's curation, a strong supporting cast, and a clear creative vision - has produced something this coherent and this affecting at this stage is not incidental. It's a reminder that musical depth accrues, that the country tradition in particular has always made room for the long view, and that some voices simply improve as they weather. Long Long Road is one of those cases. It deserves to be heard outside the bubble of devoted Ringo enthusiasts. Considerably outside it.
