Ringo Starr is only interested in making music on this condition.
In an interview published on Sunday, Jan. 12 with The Times, the Beatles rocker shared how exactly he wants to continue making music — and his condition is reasonable.
“I only want to be in a band,” Starr, 84, said. “I don’t want to be out on my own. There’s no way you can go out there and do ‘Yesterday’ just on drums.”
Starr, who joined Paul McCartney, John Lennon and George Harrison in the 1960s to form The Beatles, released a country album titled Look Up on Jan. 10. “There was no plan to make a country record,” he told the publication of his first album since 2019.
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Starr had worked with studio superintendent T Bone Burnett on Look Up. After initially meeting in the 1970s, the two reconnected and Starr asked Burnett for a song, sending him a “beautiful country track” that “blows me away even today,” the drummer said.
Burnett sent Starr more tracks, which ultimately inspired him to work on the album which features 11 songs and features Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Lucius, Larkin Poe and Alison Krauss.
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Elsewhere in the interview, Starr spoke about his skills as a singer, saying that he “always wanted to be someone else,” naming Jerry Lee.
“I mean, I can hold a tune, as long as it’s in my key. And it just worked out with the Beatles because John and Paul were great writers,” he added of his former bandmates.
“And a couple of them were really good, you know, With a ‘Little Help from My Friends’ and ‘Yellow Submarine.’ They’re still huge and I still do them on tour. They wrote me a lot of really nice songs.”
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Starr reunited with McCartney, 82, in December, performing at London’s O2 Arena. They performed “Helter Skelter” and “Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”
The duo hadn’t been onstage together since July 2019.
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