Ringo Starr Collection

Ringo Starr kicks off Give More Love, his 18th studio album of new material, with "We're on the Road Again," an ode to the working musician that effectively summarizes the third act of his career. Following the formation of the All-Starr Band, Ringo has stuck to a regular schedule of tours and albums that pop up every two or three years. Paul McCartney shows up every so often, as he does on Give More Love, singing and playing on "We're on the Road Again" – a cameo that provides a promotional hook for its initial release, but doesn't drastically change the sound of the album. Starr remains fond of late-period Beatles, goosed with a bit of arena rock volume, and since he's working with a group of well-seasoned pros, this guitar pop is all well crafted and amiable.

For a Beatle, Ringo Starr has had a relatively quiet latter-day solo career. After salvaging his tattered reputation in 1992 with Time Takes Time – his first album in nearly a decade and his first in nearly 20 years to serve his legend well – Starr settled into touring regularly with his ever-changing All-Starr Band, documenting almost every tour with a live album, then turning out a new studio album every three or four years…

Just as MTV's Unplugged series started out as a great idea – get musicians to reimagine their material in stripped-down arrangements – then was reduced by the record business to a gimmick for a new kind of live album, which is to say, yet another way to re-sell the same material, VH1's Storytellers series has quickly traced the same decline…

Cut as the Beatles were disintegrating and released shortly before the group's final album, Let It Be, Ringo Starr's debut solo album was a collection of pre-rock standards dating from the 1920s to the '50s, sung over orchestral tracks arranged by everyone from fellow Beatle Paul McCartney and Bee Gee Maurice Gibb to jazz veterans Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson. Starr brought a good-natured, nearly humorous tone to his vocals, perhaps because he wasn't trying to compete with the classic pop stylists most identified with these songs, but only to express his nostalgic affection for the material. Coming more than a decade before the fad for standards albums by rock-era pop stars like Linda Ronstadt, the album was taken not as a career move, but as a highly eccentric and expensive novelty of a kind only Beatles could afford to indulge. In retrospect, it remains harmlessly charming, if unexceptional.

Within the span of five years, Ringo Starr was able to muster up seven Top Ten singles, with three of them coming from the self-titled Ringo album. Taking all of these tracks and adding three more, Blast From Your Past ends up being a worthy ten-song collection of Starr's best solo tunes…

Cut as the Beatles were disintegrating and released shortly before the group's final album, Let It Be, Ringo Starr's debut solo album was a collection of pre-rock standards dating from the 1920s to the '50s, sung over orchestral tracks arranged by everyone from fellow Beatle Paul McCartney and Bee Gee Maurice Gibb to jazz veterans Quincy Jones and Oliver Nelson. Starr brought a good-natured, nearly humorous tone to his vocals, perhaps because he wasn't trying to compete with the classic pop stylists most identified with these songs, but only to express his nostalgic affection for the material. Coming more than a decade before the fad for standards albums by rock-era pop stars like Linda Ronstadt, the album was taken not as a career move, but as a highly eccentric and expensive novelty of a kind only Beatles could afford to indulge. In retrospect, it remains harmlessly charming, if unexceptional.

Ringo lets loose with his superstar friends in this eagerly awaited video of worldwide concert highlights from four different All Starr Bands…