Now that the surviving Beatles are in their 60s, they're turning nostalgic and avuncular, with occasional thoughts of mortality: First Paul McCartney, with his 2007 album, Memory Almost Full, and now Ringo Starr. He brings his own kindly perspective to an album of songs he wrote with various collaborators - notably the producer Dave Stewart from Eurythmics.
Starr always presented himself as the guileless, good-natured Beatle, and he isn't stopping now. He wants his old band to be remembered for declaring All You Need Is Love. For most of the album he sings about the power and virtue of love.
He treats the past with nothing but fondness. The title song of Liverpool 8 is his chronicle of joining the Beatles and leaving their hometown behind, while Harry's Song emulates the Tin Pan Alley-gone-1970s-Hollywood sound of Harry Nilsson, who died in 1994.
The production on Liverpool 8 has the heft and definition of modern multitracking, resembling Starr's early-1970s hits rather than the Beatles themselves.
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