When looking at the lineup behind The Beatles, Ringo Starr usually comes in final place when attempting to rank songwriting power. Although he may have kept time better than anyone else in the rock scene, Starr was nowhere near as proficient when coming up with new material, usually working off the sounds his bandmates had brought to the table. Once Starr did decide to make an effort as a writer, his process was a bit more unconventional than others.
Then again, there’s no set standard for how artists are supposed to write songs. Throughout The Beatles’ tenure, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were known to make tracks in any method they could get their hands on, either going into the world of backwards music or making songs indebted to the avant-garde scene.
George Harrison also brought unconventional approaches to songwriting with every track he made. Being an avid fan of the music coming out of the Eastern music scene, Harrison would infuse bits and pieces of Indian instrumentation into his music, from layering sitars onto his songs to creating sweeping pieces that didn’t rely on the conventional approaches to time signatures.
While Starr would have his first original track on The White Album with ‘Don’t Pass Me By’, he confessed to never traditionally writing songs. Describing the way he approaches a tune, Starr says that he doesn’t like the idea of putting pen to paper, telling Ringo Starr: Straight Man or Joker?: “I usually get a first verse, and then I find it impossible to get anywhere else with the song. I can’t say, ‘Now I’m going to write.’ I just have to be around a guitar or piano, and it just comes”.
In the context of The Beatles, though, Starr occasionally had some help from his musical soulmates. During the film of what was intended to be Get Back, Starr messes around on the piano for the beginning of ‘Octopus’s Garden’. While the band could have laughed off Starr’s composition, Harrison egged him on to complete the tune, helping him arrange the final piece so it would resolve itself nicely.
When working nowadays, Starr talked about slaving away for countless takes trying to find the right words for his songs, explaining, “What I do if I’m in the mood is put the tape on if I’ve got a tune, and then I play the same tune like a hundred times with different words. Then I take the tape off and get it all typed out, and then I pick the lines out that I’ll put together”.
While most songwriters would find it agonising trying to remember what to write for any specific verse, that kind of quality control is the same standard that both Lennon and McCartney worked with when sculpting their early tracks. Despite being two of the greatest melody writers in the British rock scene, the duo maintained that any track worth developing had to be something they remembered the day after they had written it.
Even though Starr’s contributions to the band’s songwriting process may have been laughed off at the time, he was more interested in serving the track above everything else. When Starr does sit down with a song, though, he knows that there’s a little bit of elbow grease involved in getting it from a halfhearted idea to the stage.
