TO HIS OWN BEAT –
July 7, 2025 – Starr, who celebrated his birthday yesterday, will be the first Beatle to reach that milestone, and like his surviving bandmate Paul McCartney, he never retired. In the past seven months alone, Starr has released a country album he recorded in Nashville and toured with his All-Starr Band. (He and his wife Barbara Bach have been sober since 1988.)
“It blows me away,” Starr said one April afternoon in Los Angeles, reflecting on his birthday. “I look in the mirror and I’m 24. I never got older than 24.”
“But guess what?” he said to himself with a cackle. “You did.”
Starr has the amiable manner of a goofy, wisecracking uncle who happens to have been in the most successful band in the history of the known universe. After wrapping a photo shoot in a suite at the Sunset Marquis (a hotel he likes, as he said teasingly, “so I don’t have to have the press in me house”), Starr was wearing his signature round sunglasses and a black blazer adorned with white peace signs, layered atop a T-shirt bearing the logo of the streetwear brand A Bathing Ape (“I love them, they’re mad”). During idle moments in the shoot, he had dropped one-liners with impeccable timing, drummed absent-mindedly on a table and occasionally sung an easygoing refrain of nonsense syllables to himself: Doo-dah, doo-dah dae.
