Another valiant effort that proves one of Liverpool’s most famous exports can fit in comfortably in Nashville.
If you’re ex-Beatle Ringo Starr, it’s got to be tough to feel like you’re always living in the shadow of your younger self, not least at the moment when filming for Sam Mendes’s highly anticipated quartet of individual Beatles member biopics is underway (Starr, in case you missed it, will be played by Irish actor Barry Keoghan), but what better way to remove the shackles of nostalgia and Beatlemania than to release a country themed album featuring the very current, very americana Molly Tuttle and Sarah Jarosz? This isn’t the first time he’s tested out the genre, however; there was his second solo release, 1970s Beaucoups of Blues, and more recently 2025’s Look Up, a spiritual predecessor to Long Long Road, with both records featuring Tuttle and having T Bone Burnett, Daniel Tashian and Bruce Sugar sharing producer credits.
The gentle, acoustic twang of the opener Returning Without Tears feels like an immediately comforting and familiar place for lovers of roots music, but Starr’s distinctive, flat vocal style is much more out of the norm, although some gentle harmonies tie everything together nicely. “I don’t know what to do / So I’ll wait till later / But soon I will be crossing the equator / Before I have to face the interrogator,” he sings on Baby Don’t Go against a rock’n’roll beat, and those are lines that hold a special kind of poignancy coming from a man who’ll be turning 86 years old in July.
Starr is no stranger to covering songs by Carl Perkins, The Beatles having recorded versions of Honey Don’t and Everybody’s Trying to Be My Baby, and wanting to add another cover from Perkins library to this album, T Bone Burnett introduced him to Perkin’s version of I Don’t See Me In Your Eyes Anymore, and the end result is charmingly faithful to Perkins’s rockabilly sound. It’s Been Too Long features Tuttle and Jarosz’s vocals nicely in the chorus, a sweet, high counterbalance to Starr’s heavier delivery. Tuttle features prominently on You and I (Wave of Love) too, she and Starr creating a winsome kind of duet as they croon about “Riding on a wave of love”.
Out of all the tracks, Choose Love, originally on Starr’s 2005 album of the same name, is probably closest to sounding Beatles-esque with its hints at psychedelia and peace-and-love message. She’s Gone flirts with classic country, featuring the tried and tested formula of heartbreak; “She never read my letter / She never got my call / How was she to ever know / I even cared at all”, while the title track finds Starr reflecting on the ever changing nature of life and how quickly things can turn around; “Sometimes life can turn around before you know it / Open your heart, open your mind, and let it flow in.”
It’s yet to be seen exactly how Mendes is going to manage splitting the upcoming Beatles films, but there has been chatter online that Starr’s namesake movie might be the most “boring”. Maybe his backstory doesn’t have quite the excitement of the other band members, but he’s certainly trying something interesting now. Long Long Road isn’t groundbreaking, but working with T Bone Burnett and featuring hugely respected genre artists like Jarosz and Tuttle is a canny move, adding an authenticity when it would be easy to doubt Starr as just another celebrity jumping on the trendy country music bandwagon. So, if you’re after an easy listen, it’s an album that’s worth a spin, even outside of the famous name on the cover.
