Ringo Starr, Keep Your Cards in Your Pocket

A famous drummer has opinions. Nobody asked, but here we are.

Ringo Starr has been telling the world which Beatles songs sit closest to his heart, and I want to be clear: the man has every right to do it. He also has every right to walk into a church social in wet boots, but that doesn't mean nobody notices.

Here is my trouble with the whole business. When you have been a Beatle, which is a thing most people will never be and which carries with it a particular kind of weight, you do not get to toss out your favorite songs like you are flipping pennies at a carnival game and then act surprised when people start arguing about the picks. "Come Together" he says, which is a fine enough song, and also a song with more legal history attached to it than a contested deed on a river-bottom farm. You want to wave that one around as your personal banner, you had better be ready for the conversation that comes with it.

"Yer Blues" being another favorite is just showing off, plain and simple. I do not say that as a criticism of the song. The song is fine. I say it because telling people your blues are better than their blues is a thing you do only when you have run out of things to actually say. You do not announce that. You demonstrate it, or you sit down.

And "Rain." Well. "Rain" is a good song that has been used to prove too many arguments for too long. A man who picks "Rain" as a favorite in the year of our Lord 2026 is a man who is either deeply sincere or working very hard to look like it, and from this porch I cannot always tell the difference.

None of this makes Ringo Starr a bad drummer. He is not a bad drummer. He is one of the best to ever sit behind a kit, and anybody who tells you otherwise has not listened carefully enough. Talent is not the question. The question is what you do with your mouth when the music has stopped.

We had a fellow come through Harrow Corners last summer who claimed he could play every Beatles song ever recorded. He was good. He was genuinely good. He played from sundown until the bats gave up and went home, and he started again in the morning, and by the time he left three days later we had all agreed without saying so out loud that we would be content to go the rest of our lives without hearing "Blackbird." The problem was not his talent. The problem was he had no sense of when the room had gotten what it needed.

Ringo's been at this a while. He knows how rooms work.

Now. I am not saying a man ought to have no opinions on music. I am saying a man ought to hold a few of them back. Mystery is not deception. It is just good sense. The Hendersons' boy, ever since the lake gave him back, barely says three words together on any given afternoon, and I will tell you he has become the most interesting person in town. People lean in when he does speak. That is a thing worth understanding.

The best pick Ringo could have made was no pick at all, or a pick so strange it raised more questions than it answered. Give people something to wonder about and they will remember you with affection. Hand them a ranked list and they will argue about it until the next thing comes along, and then they will forget you made the list entirely.

He is better than a list. We all know it. Including, I suspect, him.

So, Ringo: put the cards away. Wait until someone who means it asks the question. Then answer like you mean it too. The quiet ones stick longer than the loud ones, and you have spent your whole career proving you understand exactly that. You did not need to be the loudest one in the room. You just needed to be right on time.

That is still true. It was always true.

Pick wisely and hold a little back. That is not secrecy. That is how good things last.

Mind your corner and keep your best stories for company that earned them. -- Aunt Dot
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