Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr Duet On ‘Home To Us’

For an artist who’s spent the better part of six decades rewriting the rules of pop music, Paul McCartney has somehow managed a genuine first: a full-fledged duet with his Beatles bandmate Ringo Starr.

The nearly 84-year-old McCartney unveiled the track, titled “Home to Us,” today (May 5) during an intimate playback event at London’s Abbey Road Studios, where 50 fans were invited inside the legendary Studio Two for an early listen to his May 29 MPL/Capitol album The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The song drops Friday (May 8) as the second preview of the record, following the warmly received “Days We Left Behind.”

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As previously reported, The Boys of Dungeon Lane finds McCartney in an unusually introspective mode, revisiting his Liverpool childhood and the pre-Beatles years with a level of detail and emotional openness that sets it apart from much of his recent work. “Home to Us” appears to sit right at the center of that concept both thematically and historically.

Built from a drum track McCartney asked the 85-year-old Starr to record with producer Andrew Watt, the song evolved into something more collaborative than either Beatle initially expected.

“Ringo went round to the studio and drummed a bit,” McCartney explained. “I said to Andrew, we should make a track and send it to him. So this song is done totally with Ringo in mind. In writing the song, I’m talking about where we came from. In common with a lot of people, you come from nothing and you build yourself up. Ringo was from the Dingle, and that was well hard. He said he used to get mugged coming home, because he worked. Even though it was crazy, it was home to us. I made the song around that idea and sent it to Ringo. He sent me back a version where he just added some lines to the chorus, so I thought, maybe he doesn’t like it. I rang him and he said he thought I only wanted him to sing one or two lines, and I said I’d love to hear him sing the whole thing. So we took my first line, Ringo’s second line, and then we had a duet. We’d never done that before. Then we wanted some backing vocals and I had the idea it would be nice to hear girls. Chrissie Hynde said she’d do it, and Sharleen Spiteri, they’re mates. So they did it.”

The result is not just a novelty moment, but a quietly historic one: the two surviving Beatles trading full vocal lines on a song rooted in the very beginnings of their shared story. It’s also the only track on The Boys of Dungeon Lane to feature a guest drummer. Otherwise, McCartney returns to the one-man-band approach of his 1970 debut McCartney, handling the bulk of the instrumentation himself.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is McCartney’s first album of original music since 2020’s McCartney III, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

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