Ringo Starr ‘Looks Up’ Billy Strings For Country Album With T Bone Burnett

Billy Strings is not only a star who can fill massive arenas with his band but has also become an in-demand studio musician. For example, Beatles legend Ringo Starr and fellow music icon T Bone Burnett called upon Strings to contribute to Starr’s forthcoming country album.

Strings and “an elite crew of Nashville aces” will appear on Starr and Burnett’s Look Up, an album slated for release in January. The news of the guitarist’s participation was included in a Billy Strings feature published on Thursday by GQ. Penned by Grayson Haver Currin, the article saw the guitarist discuss his new album, Highway Prayers, his friendships with John Mayer and Trey Anastasio, his struggle with severe anxiety and many other topics.

While Starr hasn’t officially announced Look Up, Ringo spoke about the album with Fox News Digital in July. “I met him [when] Olivia Harrison was reading poems for George. There was about 100 of us there listening, and he was one of them, and I bumped into him [off and on] since the ’70s,” Starr said of Burnett.

“He said, ‘What are you doing? I said, ‘Oh, well I’m doing this, EPs [extended play albums, which have more tracks than a single, but less than a record]. I’m getting people to write a song, put some music on it,” the Beatles legend continued. While Ringo Starr had several pop songs written for the project, he thought Burnett’s tune was “absolutely one of the most beautiful country songs I ever heard. So, I thought, ‘I’m going to do a country EP.’”

When Ringo talked to Burnett about cutting additional tracks, T Bone explained he had nine songs ready to go. “I thought let’s make a real CD, so I’m back making a CD,” Starr said about the decision to turn the EP into an LP.

In May, T Bone Burnett revealed he was working on a country album with Starr while speaking to Variety. Burnett had high praise for Ringo. “He’s such a beautiful singer. Ringo was in a band with two of the best singers in rock ‘n’ roll history, so people never took him as seriously as a singer as they should. If you listen to all the country stuff he did, ‘What Goes On’ and ‘Act Naturally’ and ‘Honey Don’t,’ he did so much great country music, even in the Beatles. And, you know, he’s called Ringo Starr because that’s a cowboy name, and he wanted to be a cowboy when he was a kid. As we all did back in those days; we always all wanted to be Gene Autry.”

Starr’s first solo foray with country was Beaucoup of Blues, an album of country covers he recorded in Nashville in 1970. “Yeah, it’s pretty good. I mean, they whipped it out really quickly; I think they did it in two days or so,” Burnett said of Beaucoup of Blues. “And we’re gonna do something a little more thorough. I mean, Ringo in his third act is deserving of a serious album… I want to make a classic Ringo Starr country record. I think we can,” T Bone added.

Ringo initially planned to put out the country album this fall as per his May chat with Variety. Starr gave a status report to the outlet, stating:

“We’ve done 90% of my work. He may want to put other stuff on it. And tomorrow I’m gonna finish off the odd lines I have to re-sing or think about, and then it should be done. As far as I’m concerned, the drums are good and the songs are good and, you know, I sing to the best of my ability, but sometimes I change the melody. That’s the way I am, and I had to back off a bit and do his melody, because he wrote it. So that’s what happened. It just came about and we’re just going with the flow. And now we’ve got a country record. The last country LP was… was it 1970? [Beaucoups of Blues.] And now we’ve got one coming out probably in October. Because it’ll be coming out on vinyl and on cd, you’ve gotta get it in, and now it’s like five or six months before you put anything out. I mean, I’d like to finish it here and put it on the radio right now, but you can’t do that anymore.”

Stay tuned for more information about Look Up.