Paul McCartney Announces new Duet with Ringo Starr: “Home to Us” Lands on The Boys of Dungeon Lane

Fifty six years after the last handshake at Savile Row, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr are doing the one thing the Beatles somehow never got around to doing: an actual, bona fide, you-sing-a-line-I-sing-a-line duet. And wouldn't you know it, the song is about Liverpool.

The news dropped in the most McCartney way imaginable. No Super Bowl trailer, no TikTok teaser, no press release cut into seven mysterious pieces. Just Paul, thirty fans, and producer Andrew Watt in a room at Watt's Diamond Dust studios in Los Angeles on Thursday, April 16th, running the album top to bottom and talking through it like a mate playing you his demos. Somewhere between the first cup of tea and the last track, McCartney let it slip that Ringo was on one of them. The room, one imagines, did not remain composed.

The album is called The Boys of Dungeon Lane, it arrives May 29th, and it is McCartney's first solo record since McCartney III back in 2020, which is either five years ago or five minutes ago depending on how your own relationship with the pandemic shook out. The record is being pitched as Paul's most introspective to date, a trip back into Liverpool in the years before the mop tops, before Hamburg, before the screaming, before any of it. Quiet streets, rough neighborhoods, two kids named Richard Starkey and James Paul McCartney who had no idea what was coming.

The duet is called “Home to Us,” and the origin story is pure Beatles in the best way, which is to say it involves a slight misunderstanding, a bit of wounded pride, and a song at the end of it.

McCartney tells it like this. He ran into Ringo, mentioned he'd been working with Watt, and Ringo swung by the studio to bash around on the kit. Something got lost in translation between the drummer and the producer, and Ringo left the session a little cheesed off. Paul, being Paul, took the drum take and built a song around it about growing up in Liverpool. He sent the demo to Ringo expecting a full vocal and got only the chorus back, which made him think Ringo didn't fancy the tune. A conversation was had. Ringo came back, cut more drums, finished the vocals, and the thing finally stood up on its own two feet.

Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas are on there too, stacking the choruses, giving the whole thing a wider, warmer room. Billboard is calling it the most Beatle-esque cut on the record, all tempo shifts and key changes, the kind of song where you feel Paul winking at the past without actually dressing up in the costume.

And here's the wild part, the fact that makes you stop and do the mental math. For all the times the ex-Beatles helped each other out on solo records over the decades, for all the drum fills George asked Ringo to lay down and all the times Paul sang backup on this and John played guitar on that, there has never been a proper, formal, two-names-above-the-title duet between any two former bandmates. Not once. Fifty six years and no duet. The thing fans have been quietly hoping for since 1970, finally delivered without fanfare in a Los Angeles listening room.

Paul clocked it himself at the session, joking that Ringo had never done a duet with a Beatle. There was a laugh, and then the track played, and somewhere out there a few dozen fans realized they were hearing something that should have existed already and didn't.

The two have been drifting closer in public for a while now. They shared the stage at the O2 in London in December 2024 for “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (Reprise)” and “Helter Skelter.” Before that, they teamed up for “Now and Then,” the Jeff Lynne-assisted final Beatles song. Ringo has his own new record, Long Long Road, out April 24th. Everyone is working. Nobody is slowing down. The lads from Liverpool are still, somehow, the lads from Liverpool.

The line McCartney keeps coming back to when he talks about “Home to Us” is simple enough. Even though where they lived was a little rough, it was home. That's the whole record, probably. That's the whole friendship, definitely.

May 29th. Mark the calendar.