Album Review – Ringo Starr’s “Look Up”

Reviews 65 Comments


(#570 Americana on the Country DDS)

Look, this album is fine. Let’s not get too exercised over an 84-year-old musical legend making an album, and calling it country because it makes for a good story and gets everyone excited. But when you prop Sir Ringo Starr in front of a camera, perch a cowboy hat on top of his head, and tell me vociferously he’s releasing a country album, you better not be shitting in my hand and telling me its cotton candy. Then I’m compelled to pipe up with my little voice of dissent.

Look Up is not a bad album at all. There’s not a single song or moment on it that will feel offensive to a country fan’s ears. In fact, when you settle in with it, it goes along just fine. What’s so frustrating is the decisions that were made when making this album, and the opportunity of what it could have been that it wasn’t. The album just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, until you factor in that the primary songwriter and producer was T Bone Burnett.

For the uninitiated, Ringo Starr actually has a legitimate history with country music. He sang and contributed to numerous Beatles songs and albums with strong country influences, including a version of “Act Naturally” originally by Buck Owens on The Beatles’ 1965 Help! album. Then in 1970, Ringo Starr released a straight up country album called Beaucoups of Blues.

The Beaucoups album came together thanks to Country Music Hall of Fame steel guitar player Pete Drake taking Ringo under his wing, bringing him to Nashville, and pairing him up with some of the greatest songwriters and session players in town. Charlie Daniels and Jerry Reed played guitar, Pete Drake was on pedal steel, Charlie McCoy was on harmonica, and The Jordanaires appeared on backing vocals. 

Beaucoups of Blues is not a legendary album in country music. But it’s a cool moment when Nashville guys got behind a music legend. It’s fun, and has heart. In the case of Look Up, instead of mining Nashville for great songs—of which there are many these days not getting recorded—T Bone Burnett stamped out nine of the eleven songs himself, and it sounds that way. Much of the writing feels elementary and uninspired.


When you look at the track list and see that Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Alison Krauss, and Larkin Poe appear, you get super excited about the instrumental prowess that will be on display. But instead, T Bone Burnett took some of the top pickers of our day, and relegated them to rhythm players and harmony singers. It’s not only that the instrumentation on Look Up is unremarkable, it’s downright muted and missing.

Yes, some of the songs do have a country-sounding mood to them, including the album’s first single “Time On My Hands” with its steel guitar accompaniment, the silver screen whistling and Western feel of “Come Back” with indie rockers Lucius singing harmony, “Rosetta” with Larkin Poe has kind of a half time Outlaw beat to it, and “You Want Some” at the 9th slot on the album gives you a straight up country feel, finally.

But Look Up is Americana at best, and decidedly so with that sort of genre-less, meandering, nondescript sound that sometimes lends to highlighting excellent songwriting, but in this case the songs have little to say. This album came about from Ringo Starr reaching out to T Bone Burnett to ask him to write a song for him. T Bone ended up writing nine of them, and imagining up this entire album. But you have to wonder if T Bone imagined it up for Ringo, or for himself.

Again, there is absolutely nothing offensive about Look Up. And after you settle into what it is as opposed to what you wanted it to be, it’s fine, if not rather pleasant from the sort of innocent simplicity and sanguine aspect that Starr always brings to his music. But this could have been a cool, late career moment for Ringo similar to Beaucoups of Blues was at the start of his solo career, bookending his catalog with country projects. Instead, it feels like Look Up will be an afterthought.

6.7/10

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