Ringo Starr has spoken about covering John Lennon‘s ‘Grow Old With Me’ with Paul McCartney for his latest album ‘What’s My Name’.
Starr’s take on the Lennon song, which was first released posthumously in 1984 on Yoko Ono and the late Beatle‘s ‘Milk and Honey’, features on his new album which is out today (October 25).
The track features McCartney on bass and backing vocals, and you can hear it below.
Starr has now explained to Billboard that he first heard ‘Grow Old With Me’ a couple of years ago when he was handed a CD of Lennon’s 1980 ‘The Bermuda Tapes’ by ‘Double Fantasy’ producer Jack Douglas.
“And it was hard to listen to in the beginning because John talks about me, mentions me,” Starr said. “It was very emotional for me. I listened to all the songs, but he recorded all of them bar one. And that was this one, you know, “Grow Old With Me” – I did the best I could.
“I brought a few people in,” he continued. “I called Paul and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got this song. It’s a John song, you know, I’m going to put it on the album. You coming in, you could play bass for me please?’ He said, ‘Sure, I’m coming over.’ And that’s what it was.
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“And what is really exciting, I’m on it, Paul’s on it, and Jack Douglas, unbeknownst to me, I go down to the studio where he’s putting the string section on and I listen to this music. He uses a George [Harrison] riff that everybody knows. So we’re all there now.”
Starr acknowledged that the cover was a “poignant” creation, adding that the recording of the song “moved me”.
“I did my best and it’s very me, but you know, [Lennon] wrote those words and he’d written songs for me before, so I thought, ‘No, I’m gonna do it.'”
Next month, a new and limited edition vinyl box set of The Beatles‘ UK singles will go on sale.