In a garbage world, here’s some good news: Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are making new music together. You may have heard of these two scamps, who were members of a certain superstar singing group in the 1960s — something called the Beatles. We’ve attained this scoop via the same method as everyone else with an Internet connection: Ringo posted it on Twitter.
“Thanks for coming over man and playing Great bass,” Ringo tweets, with that adorable random punctuation shared by old men posting on social media everywhere. And apparently former Eagle Joe Walsh stopped by as well:
According to Pitchfork, Sir Paul lent his bass to a track (or tracks) on Ringo’s latest album, which also features guest appearances by Walsh, Peter Frampton, and Heartbreaker Benmont Trench.
To be clear: collaborations between the two surviving Beatles are nothing new. They first teamed right after the Beatles split up, for a track on Starr’s 1970 album Sentimental Journey, and again on his 1973 Ringo – a record on which each of his former Beatles bandmates wrote and guested on at least one song, in what read as something of a “Hey, is Ringo gonna be okay?” gesture. After John Lennon’s death, McCartney, Starr, and George Harrison played together on George’s Lennon tribute song “All Those Years Ago” and on the Beatle reunion numbers “Real Love” and “Free As a Bird”; Paul worked on tracks on Starr’s albums Ringo’s Rotogravure, Stop and Smell the Roses, Vertical Man, and Y Not, and Starr returned the favor by drumming on McCartney’s albums Tug of War, Pipes of Peace, Give My Regards to Broad Street, and Flaming Pie. Most recently, they played together on the 2014 special The Night That Changed America: A Grammy Salute to the Beatles (it didn’t go so well).
Point is, Macca dropping in to strum bass on Ringo’s new album isn’t exactly unprecedented. But perhaps because so many of us are hungry for something to look forward to, it seems like a really big deal.