Ringo Starr was the Beatles’ cowboy: the grizzled, silent type, from the wrong side of the tracks, with a roughly emotive voice redolent of heartbroken days rounding up cattle. So of course the songs he sang for the Beatles were those where the Liverpool band embraced its country music influences—notably on “Act Naturally,” a Johnny Russell/Buck Owens number that Starr performed like a man with a crippling hangover on a horse ride to Misery.
Starr made a country album in 1970: Beaucoups of Blues, which he recorded in Nashville with pedal steel player Pete Drake. Fifty-five years later, he returns to the genre on Look Up, this time in the company of T Bone Burnett, the former Dylan guitarist whose work with Elvis Costello and Robert Plant suggests a gift for teasing cowpoke swing out of elderly English gentlemen.
You could make a case for this being Burnett’s album as much as Starr’s. The production is modern but not aggressively so, and full of wonderfully sensitive touches, like the luxurious cradle of pedal steel and strings that winds around “Time on My Hands.” Burnett plays guitar on most tracks and has songwriting credits on nine of the 11 songs, to Starr’s one. But the Nashville-based producer knows we’ve all come here for a Beatle, and his songs are perfectly judged for Starr’s air of hangdog melancholy and limited but poignant vocal tone.
The title song is tailor made for Starr to undersell, its positive messaging—“Up above your head/Where the music plays/There’s a light that shines/In the darkest days”—slyly subverted by his characteristic Liverpudlian ennui. On “Never Let Me Go,” the distinct air of Merseybeat cuts through the Nashville finery, right down to its “Love Me Do”-esque harmonica melody. It’s the kind of song Lennon and McCartney might have knocked up in an afternoon to give their drummer something to sing on the Beatles’ second album of the calendar year. And Starr responds well to such handling: He’s in fine voice throughout the record, the slight rasp on “Come Back” the only real evidence of the passing years—and one that suits the song’s rueful stroll.
Sadly, his fantastically expressive percussive style isn’t as well served. The drumming on Look Up is solid, but Starr only lets his personality shine on the opener, “Breathless,” where he deploys his characteristic tumbling drum fills; the fabric of ’60s nostalgia unfolds in lazy tom hits and the electrifying cymbal rush that lit up so many Beatles songs. The sidelining of his talents on the kit is a disappointment, but it’s not a deal breaker. On the whole, Look Up succeeds for the same reasons that Beaucoups of Blues did: songs that play to Starr’s vocal strengths, a sympathetic supporting cast, and a natural, Nashville feel.
The album isn’t entirely without risk, and one of the best songs comes when Burnett pushes the boat out a little. Billy Strings’ growling electric guitar line gives “Rosetta” a grunge-y, drone-y feel that complements Starr’s gruffly welcoming voice. It’s neither a wild experiment or a late-period artistic upheaval in the Johnny Cash/Rick Rubin model. But compared to Joe Walsh’s ill-advised anti-internet “rap” on “Gotta Get Up to Get Down,” from Starr’s previous album, What's My Name, the song shows that the former Beatle doesn’t have to be cased in amber.
That Look Up is relevant enough to appeal beyond longtime fans is partly thanks to musical fashion coming around to Starr. But the former Beatle has the doleful vocal charm to sound at home in country music, the shrewdness to pick the right collaborators, and the sense to—well—act naturally among them. Craggy, wounded, and oddly philosophical, Look Up makes a timely case for Starr as one of the UK’s most convincing country singers, his gritty Liverpool blues stretching right back across the Atlantic.
