Rating: 5/10
Ringo Starr, the 84-year-old former Beatle who has yet to stop creating music, released his 21st studio album, “Look Up,” last Friday.
Country music has undeniably seen a recent rise in popularity. Country musicians have had several popular hits over the past few years, and even pop artists such as Beyoncé and Lana Del Rey have entered the genre.
Starr isn’t just jumping on the country music bandwagon, though — he’s been a long-time country music fan and first dipped into the genre with “Beaucoups Of Blues,” his second solo album that he recorded in Nashville shortly after The Beatles split in 1970.
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Additionally, Starr said his second country album, “Look Up,” wasn’t created because of any resurgence in country music but came alive after a meeting with producer and songwriter T Bone Burnett, who co-wrote many of the 11 tracks.
Despite Starr’s everlasting fame as The Beatles’ highly talented drummer, expectations going into this album weren’t particularly high. Starr has never been renowned for his vocals or songwriting abilities, contributing to only a few of The Beatles’ songs in their later days and achieving only a few hits of his own post-breakup.
Even though Starr dons a cowboy hat for the album cover, this doesn’t change the fact that he was born and raised in Liverpool, which isn’t exactly a hub for the country music genre.
With or without these prejudgments, Starr’s album is incredibly unimpressive and mediocre. Many of the songs are entertaining but lack depth and originality as well as the warmth, liveliness and relatability typically found in country music.
The various collaborators on the album — Lucius, Billy Strings, Larkin Poe and Molly Tuttle — add some of these aforementioned qualities, especially Tuttle, who brought emotion to songs with her warm voice and harmonies. However, the album is overall soulless.
The lyrics throughout the album are underwhelming and unoriginal, and Starr’s cold, passive singing style only adds to the blandness. Almost all the tracks are love songs yet lack feeling or relatability, both because of the cliché lyrics and Starr’s delivery.
Where the album fails in lyrics and singing, it makes up for in instrumentation. The highlight of the album is undoubtedly Starr’s musicianship, with his drumming on tracks such as “Breathless” and “Look Up.”
The guitar on tracks such as “Rosetta” is impressive and captivating, and the feature of harmonica on songs such as “Never Let Me Go” both adds to the country-music spirit and reminds listeners of classic Beatles songs like “Love Me Do.”
Tracks like “Can You Hear Me Call” and “Come Back” are by far the most interesting, with catchy choruses and rich backing vocals.
However, the best song on the album is undoubtedly its title track, “Look Up,” whose spirit is the closest to country music that this album gets.
The song has a simple but catchy melody, an interesting guitar line and captivating lyrics such as “Live to fight another day/ Good things are gonna come your way.” Tuttle’s background singing adds some country authenticity. It’s also the only track that isn’t a love song, and the themes of optimism and resilience during hard times feel genuine and relatable.
“Look Up” is overall inauthentic, uninteresting and lacks the soul or depth that country music needs. However, it isn’t the worst thing an aging 20th-century music star has spit out, as some tracks are genuinely fun to listen to, mostly because of the instrumentation and collaboration with other musicians.
At the end of the day, Starr isn’t trying to create a record-breaking album — he’s in every position to just relax and have fun with his music. Although the country album doesn’t exactly reflect an intense passion for the genre, a good amount of his enthusiasm does come through.
