Ringo Starr’s 21st studio album, Look Up, returns to one of the British musician’s great loves—country music.
Look Up was released today, January 10. Various collaborations with young artists such as Billy Strings, Molly Tuttle, Lucius, and Larkin Poe, as well as with country music’s big name Alison Kraus, shows that Ringo Starr has not lost any of the vitality he has made us accustomed to over the past six and a half decades.
The album starts promisingly enough, and the nostalgic subtext of the lyrics accompanies us from the first three or four songs right through to the end of the LP.
If we are to be completely honest, Look Up is certainly not Ringo Starr’s most successful album, but rather a musical work that brings the above-mentioned artists to the limelight and into the public eye, giving a contemporary country music infusion of very good quality.
Even if Ringo’s effort doesn’t fall into the worthy league of his first solo albums, the fact that at almost 85 years of age, he is still able to produce music of very high quality is in itself a great achievement. After all, who would have thought in 1965, when he was singing the Beatles’ cover of Act Naturally, that Ringo’s love of country music would still be going strong six decades later?
All in all, Ringo Starr’s 2025 effort gets a reasonable 6.5/10 and is without a shadow of doubt another proof that great loves, like country music for Ringo, never die. And more than that, let’s be delighted that in 2025 a former Beatle is still giving us music, and not just any kind of musical creation, but a very complex and artistically highly-valued one.
