One gets the impression that when Ringo Starr wants something, he can get it with ease. When The Beatles fell apart and the drummer-vocalist wanted to begin his solo career in earnest, everyone from Billy Preston to Robbie Robertson to Marc Bolan—to say nothing of the others in the Fab Four—came to his call. When he chose to finally start playing live years after his start as a solo artist, he developed his ever-changing All-Starr Band (quite literally a lineup of famous name-above-the-title musicians), whose current iteration will start their 2024 tour shortly.
And at a time when most of rock’s elders choose to eschew newly penned music in favor of reliable old hits, Starr takes a chance and releases fresh EPs and LPs on the regular by simply discussing with his favorite songwriters what it is they can do for him. Perhaps this sounds like an over-simplification, but let’s look at Starr’s current state of affairs—namely his new Crooked Boy EP, written and produced in full by Linda Perry. Speaking from his intimate home studio out back of his Los Angeles estate to a group of journalists over Zoom, the impossibly 83-year-old musician enthusiastically launches into a conversation not about the past, but very much about the present and the immediate future that finds him finishing (another) country album with producer and old friend T Bone Burnett in the wake of Crooked Boy’s release.
“Linda plays a big part—she’s written the songs, she put a band on it, she’d send me the files, or she’d come over and I would sing the songs,” says Starr, quickly remembering a crucial aspect of the production process: “I played drums first, and then I would sing the songs…and then she’d take it back and do whatever she wanted to do with it.” No muss, no fuss. Which, from speaking to Starr, is just how he likes his music and the creative process through which it’s conceived.
Thinking back to 2020 for a moment, Starr considers his home studio with its gym and art room nearby that kept him busy through the pandemic (to say nothing of his published volumes of self-snapped photographs), thinks out loud about COVID vaccines and masking, and shares how getting new tracks from his friends was as easily effortless as asking a neighbor for sugar. “What it led to was that I would ask you, you know, ‘You got a song?’ Or, you know, ‘Do you want to use these couple of guys in bands, or producers?’ And they'd find songs, and they put stuff on it. So when [the track] came to me, it had some meat.”
“The world’s gone mad, and the grass won’t grow. But oh, there’s a flower in the corner. What do you know?”
Ringo mentions family members (such as brother-in-law Joe Walsh) and All-Starr band associates such as Toto’s Steve Lukather sending files or stopping around to the home studio. If nothing else, it sounds like great fun having people zipping files and hitting up the Starr estate for a hang and some tunes. “Linda’s name came up and I just called her and said, ‘You know, I’m making an EP and have you, you know, have you got a song?’” he says with a smile. “And so she did that for two years,” Starr notes of a relationship that began with 2021’s “Coming Undone” and 2022’s “Everyone and Everything” (for 2023’s Rewind Forward EP, though, Perry couldn’t make it and Starr had to settle for songs from Benmont Tench, Mike Campbell, and Paul McCartney).
“Ringo, let me do an EP on you,” was how Starr remembers Perry’s initial conversations for the four tracks that fill Crooked Boy, featuring some of her most focused, personalized songwriting. “She’s a serious songwriter, great to hang out with. I mean, she’s really a great musician. She can be bossy. But that’s OK.” Recalling that Starr grew up as a sickly kid, Perry focused the lyrics of Crooked Boy on the drummer’s childhood pain and perseverance. “She was excited to show me this, [as it was] edgy for me,” Starr recalls. “But I made my way through it all. And I did change one line from being a ‘crooked boy who made his own way’ [to] ‘I’m a Teddy boy who made my own way’ as the thing we were in Liverpool for, like being gang members. We were Teddy boys.”
“‘Linda, write me a rock song.’ She said, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Just write me one,’ I said. And that’s how we got to the incredible ‘Gonna Need Someone.’”
When I ask Starr if there was anything that he specifically requested Perry to pen for him, stylistically, among these four “beautiful” melodies, he says yes. “‘Linda, write me a rock song.’ She said, ‘What’s that?’ ‘Just write me one,’ I said. And that's how we got to the incredible ‘Gonna Need Someone.’”
Even the mood of a song gets a weigh-in from the drummer and vocalist before he records. The best example comes with the black clouds and bleak horizons of the EP opener “February Skies” and its metaphorical gloomy environment. Starr loved the track, but asked that her last verse offer even a glint of sunshine. “There’s gotta be a break in there that it can be lovable,” says a man famous for his “peace and love” motto. “The world’s gone mad, and the grass won’t grow. But oh, there’s a flower in the corner. What do you know? That’s the only thing I demand. If you’re writing me a song, it can be a downer, but it’s got to have some up.” FL
