With his new album Look Up, Ringo Starr proves that a white hat does not a country album make | Canada Voices

The new Ringo Starr album, Look Up, opens at a breakneck tempo with a bunch of flashy acoustic guitar fills from Billy Strings, a young bluegrass star. At one point, Starr sings: “When I see you on the boulevard, my spirit flies and my heart beats hard.”

Wait, did he say “boulevard”?

Starr wears a white Stetson on the album cover. He and his Nashville record label for this project, Lost Highway, think they’ve made a country record. They have not. A white cowboy hat does not a country album make – are you listening, Beyoncé?

Country songs happen on dirt roads. Gravel roads. Obviously, country roads, preferably ones which take you home to West Virginia. We will even accept old town roads. (You’re welcome, Lil Nas X.) Where country tunes do not happen is on boulevards. Leave them to Journey, Jackson Browne, Lou Reed and Springsteen.

I like the new Starr disc. Look Up is produced and mostly written by Nashville legend T Bone Burnett, with guest spots from Alison Krauss, Molly Tuttle, Joe Walsh, Lucius and Larkin Poe. There are credible moments of pedal steel guitar, mandolin and fiddle.

On the twangy Come Back, Starr even whistles. It’s a country song – a beautiful, lonesome one that will make your heart go achy and breaky. The album as a whole is not country, though. I’ll explain why not later.

White cowboy hats are in fashion these days in the high-stakes music world, particularly in the booming pop-to-country crossover industry. In addition to Beyoncé (with Cowboy Carter) others topping their heads with 10-gallon statements include Post Malone, Jelly Roll and the bar-song breakout star, Shaboozey.

There’s more on the way: Lana Del Rey is expected to go hayseed with a forthcoming album that was originally going to be called Lasso. The Manhattan native has already covered John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads.

“If you can’t already tell by our award winners and our performers, the music business is going country,” the singer-songwriter said at last year’s National Music Publishers’ Association songwriter awards ceremony. “We’re going country. It’s happening.”

Twenty-five years ago, Canadian country star Terri Clark released the album Fearless, which was her attempt to move from twang to a more mainstream sound. At the Toronto hotel where she spoke to The Globe and Mail about the record, a large white cowboy hat sat in the corner of the room, not on her head.

“Very few artists can get away with not constantly reinventing themselves and still sell records,” she said at the time.

So, for the Fearless album, Clark lost the hat and went pop. Taylor Swift obviously did the same, years ago. The music industry abhors a vacuum even more than nature does. Starr, Del Rey and the rest have picked up the white hats others have tossed aside.

Look Up isn’t Starr’s first rodeo. His second solo album, 1970′s Beaucoups of Blues, was recorded in Nashville with twang-tune specialists such as Charlie Daniels, Jerry Reed, Ben Keith, D. J. Fontana, Charlie McCoy, the Jordanaires and Scotty Moore. Among the songs were Fastest Growing Heartache in the West and Wine, Women and Loud Happy Songs. There was also a midtempo weeper about a musician who missed his mother.

“Mama, I guess you have stood and cursed,” Starr sang on $15 Draw. “The day I found that old guitar, when uncle Harry died …”

It’s a story song, a staple of the country form. The new album doesn’t have anything comparable. Country songs are often directed right at the listener, as well. Starr doesn’t do that on Look Up. It’s not a country record.

He should know better. For the Beatles’ White Album, he wrote and sang the country-rocker Don’t Pass Me By. On the same album is Paul McCartney’s Rocky Raccoon, which tells a story. It’s a country song – a parody of a country song, sure, but still a country song. (The same thing goes with the Rolling Stones’ Far Away Eyes.)

Of course, it doesn’t really matter what you call Look Up. Country? Roots? Americana? Whatever it’s called, you can bet it will land a Grammy nomination in some category or another.

A cowboy hat used to represent individuality, ruggedness, stoicism. Today it stands for conformity. It’s just marketing. Take off the hat, Ringo, it doesn’t fit you.