Long Long Road: Ringo Starr at 85, Still Finding New Ground

There’s something improbable about the best chapter of Ringo Starr’s solo career arriving when he’s 85 years old. And yet here we are. Long Long Road, released April 24th, 2026, is Ringo’s 22nd studio album—and by almost any measure, it’s among the finest work he’s ever put his name to outside the Beatles. The drummer the world spent decades underestimating has, in the final innings of an extraordinary life, found his truest musical home. 🎸

How It Happened

The story of Long Long Road begins with a poetry reading. That’s where T Bone Burnett—one of the most celebrated producers in American music, the man behind the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack and HBO’s Nashville—connected with Ringo in a way that would change his late-career trajectory entirely. “I always heard Ringo as a Texas artist,” Burnett has explained. “The way he played felt just like Texas music to me.” So he wrote Ringo a Gene Autry-style song, because that’s where his instincts pointed.

The result was Look Up, Ringo’s first country record in more than 50 years, his first since Beaucoups of Blues in 1970. It was an unexpected critical and commercial triumph, earning him his first Top 10 on Billboard’s all-genre Top Album Sales chart and, in the UK, his first solo #1 album, overtaking Taylor Swift at the top of the Official Country Chart. Nobody saw that coming. Not even Ringo.

He has been characteristically straightforward about how the follow-up happened: “After we did the last record, which I love listening to, this one just sort of happened. I like to say sometimes I make the right moves, like you can go left or right at any point, and one of the right moves was hooking up with T Bone for Look Up, and now for this one, which I’m calling Long Long Road, because I’ve been on a long long road.” ✨

What It Sounds Like

Recorded in Nashville and Los Angeles, Long Long Road is a ten-song set rooted in country and Americana but reaching wider—what Ringo’s camp describes as an aural mosaic of his musical legacy and influences. The core band, which T Bone affectionately calls “The Texans” after a 1959 Liverpool band Ringo played with before the Beatles, returns from Look Up: Paul Franklin, David Mansfield, Dennis Crouch, Daniel Tashian, Rory Hoffman, Patrick Warren, and Colin Linden. Burnett would send Ringo tracks with some meat on them, and Ringo would send back his drum and singing parts. Then Burnett would complete the deal—a process Ringo describes as “a great way of working.”

Molly Tuttle returns, duetting with Starr on three of the ten tracks, including the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss-styled opener “Returning Without Tears.” Billy Strings appears for Everly Brothers-fashioned harmonies on “My Baby Don’t Want Nothing.” Sheryl Crow pops up on the title track, which features Ringo’s meditation-informed spoken-word section: “Don’t be attacked by your thoughts… let them come in, let them go.” St. Vincent cameos on “Choose Love,” a reworking of a 2005 Ringo song now given a mid-60s R&B swing and a psychedelic edge.

The Carl Perkins connection is particularly meaningful. “I recorded two Carl Perkins songs with The Beatles, and both T Bone and I wanted one on this record,” Ringo explained. “He found this beautiful track I’d never heard before, ‘I Don’t See Me In Your Eyes Anymore’.” The choice is both a personal tribute and a musical statement about where Ringo’s deepest roots actually lie—not in Merseybeat or psychedelia, but in the American roots music that first captivated a young Richard Starkey in Liverpool. 🎵

The Long Road That Got Him Here

Richard Starkey was born July 7, 1940, making him 85 years old—the oldest living Beatle. What’s less well known is how deep his country roots go, and how early. In the late 1950s, Ringo was the busiest drummer in Liverpool, largely because he owned his own kit. His heart lay in country music so completely that he actually applied to the American Embassy for factory work in Texas, simply so he could be nearer to the music he loved. The embassy paperwork proved too much of a drag, so he never completed it. It was a Sliding Doors moment—had it gone through, there would have been no Ringo Starr in the Beatles.

His solo career has been long and varied across more than five decades—stretching from the orchestrated pop of Sentimental Journey and the country soul of Beaucoups of Blues in 1970, through the glam rock hit “Back Off Boogaloo,” the sentimental classic “It Don’t Come Easy,” and years of well-received if commercially modest pop-rock albums. For a period he stepped back from full album releases, releasing EPs instead. The T Bone Burnett collaboration has rejuvenated everything. 🎶

What the Critics Are Saying

The reviews have been strong. Mojo gave it four stars, writing that while Ringo may indeed have travelled a long long road, here he sounds 85 years young.

Clash Magazine noted that country and western has been embedded in Richard Starkey’s bones for decades, since before his debut as a lyricist and vocalist in the Beatles with “Don’t Pass Me By,” right up to last year’s Look Up. Love is the undercurrent of the album, with most lyrics carrying Ringo’s well-renowned peace and love message, heard loudest in “Choose Love.”

The New Statesman‘s Kate Mossman offered one of the more distinctive takes, writing that Ringo was never a genius, so as time has gone by his solo records have taken on a value proportional to his age—which cannot be said of Paul McCartney. She described the album as classic country in the Fifties mode, with the feel of what they’d call Western swing, bringing to mind boot-lace ties and black-and-white TV studios loaded with hay bales.

Cult Following gave it four out of five, observing that only now does it feel like Starr is finding a sound he is comfortable with, and that he has pieced together a fine late-stage career album. The reviewer singled out “Choose Love” as a smart track—a nod not just to Ringo’s peace and love rhetoric but to Tomorrow Never Knows and the Ringoisms that propelled the Beatles into naming some of their very best songs.

Album of the Year’s aggregated critic score currently sits at 80 out of 100 based on six reviews—solid, consistent praise rather than rapture, which feels about right for a record that is excellent at being exactly what it sets out to be. 📊Where This Fits

Ringo has always been an easier figure to underestimate than to properly see. The drummer jokes are evergreen. His voice has never been mistaken for a great instrument. His solo career produced plenty of pleasant, lightweight work alongside the genuine gems—”It Don’t Come Easy,” “Photograph,” Beaucoups of Blues—and the consensus around him calcified decades ago.

What the T Bone Burnett collaboration has done is find the truest version of Ringo’s musical identity and surround it with the space and craft it deserves. This isn’t Ringo performing country music as a novelty or a nostalgia exercise. It’s a man returning, at the end of a long road, to the place his heart has always been. 🌟