Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr Duet on ‘Home to Us’ From New Album

The two surviving Beatles trade lead vocal lines for the first time on a track built around their shared Liverpool roots.

Paul McCartney unveiled ‘Home to Us,’ a full vocal duet with Ringo Starr, at an intimate fan playback event at Abbey Road Studios on May 5, previewing his forthcoming album The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The track, which also features backing vocals from Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas, is set for release as a single on May 8 and marks the first time the two surviving Beatles have traded complete lead vocal lines on a song.

How ‘Home to Us’ Came Together

The song grew out of a drum session McCartney arranged with producer Andrew Watt. Starr, 85, came in and laid down a drum track, and McCartney then built the song around that foundation with a specific concept in mind: the working-class Liverpool neighborhoods where both men grew up.

McCartney described the creative process at the Abbey Road event: ‘Ringo went round to the studio and drummed a bit. 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.’

When McCartney sent the finished track to Starr, the response was more modest than he had hoped. ‘He sent me back a version where he just added some lines to the chorus, so I thought, maybe he doesn’t like it,’ McCartney said. A phone call cleared up the misunderstanding. ‘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.’

Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri Round Out the Track

Once the duet was in place, McCartney turned his attention to the backing vocals. ‘Then we wanted some backing vocals and I had the idea it would be nice to hear girls,’ he said. ‘Chrissie Hynde said she’d do it, and Sharleen Spiteri, they’re mates. So they did it.’

The combination of Hynde and Spiteri, both veteran rock figures in their own right, gives the track a distinctly British character that fits the song’s thematic focus on working-class origins. Spiteri is the lead vocalist of Texas, the Glasgow-formed band that has been a fixture of British rock and pop since the late 1980s.

A Note on Beatles Duet History

While McCartney described ‘Home to Us’ as a first, that claim deserves a small asterisk. The two did sing together on ‘Walk With You,’ a track from Starr’s 2010 album Y Not, and Starr contributed backing vocals to ‘Beautiful Night,’ a single from McCartney’s 1997 album Flaming Pie, also appearing in the video. The distinction McCartney appears to be drawing is the full lead-vocal trade-off structure, where each man carries alternating lines throughout the song, which does appear to be new territory for the pair in this specific format.

The song is also notable for its instrumentation. ‘Home to Us’ is the only track on The Boys of Dungeon Lane to feature a guest drummer. Across the rest of the album, McCartney, now nearly 84, handles the bulk of the playing himself, echoing the one-man-band approach he first used on his 1970 solo debut McCartney.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane: What to Expect

McCartney described The Boys of Dungeon Lane at the Abbey Road event as his ‘most introspective album to date.’ The record revisits his Liverpool childhood and the pre-Beatles years in detail. ‘Home to Us’ is the second single from the album, following the earlier release ‘Days We Left Behind.’

The album arrives May 29 on MPL/Capitol. It is McCartney’s first collection of original material since McCartney III, released in 2020, which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.

What we know

• ‘Home to Us’ is a duet between Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr, set for single release on May 8.
• The track was previewed at a fan playback event at Abbey Road Studios on May 5, attended by 50 fans in Studio Two.
• The song features backing vocals from Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri of Texas.
• The Boys of Dungeon Lane is scheduled for release on May 29 via MPL/Capitol.
• McCartney described the album as his ‘most introspective album to date’ at the Abbey Road event.
• The Boys of Dungeon Lane is McCartney’s first album of original music since McCartney III (2020), which debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200.
• McCartney and Starr previously sang together on ‘Walk With You’ from Starr’s 2010 album Y Not, and Starr contributed backing vocals to ‘Beautiful Night’ from McCartney’s 1997 album Flaming Pie.
• ‘Home to Us’ is the only track on the album to feature a guest drummer; McCartney plays most instruments himself on the rest of the record.

The take

The Boys of Dungeon Lane arrives at a moment when McCartney’s catalog is under more scrutiny than ever, partly because of the ongoing legal battle over Beatles copyright ownership and partly because the 2023 ‘Now and Then’ single reframed public conversation about what a Beatles recording can still be in the 21st century. Against that backdrop, a deeply personal album built around Liverpool origins feels like a deliberate pivot inward rather than outward. The one-man-band format, revisiting the approach of the 1970 McCartney LP, has historically served him as a reset mechanism, a way to strip away the apparatus of a major rock production and work from instinct. That he chose to break that self-contained approach specifically for Starr is telling. The two have circled each other collaboratively for decades, appearing on each other’s records in supporting roles, but a full lead-vocal trade-off is structurally different from a cameo. It places both men as co-narrators of a shared story. Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri are not random choices either; both are British rock lifers with deep roots in the same post-war working-class culture the song addresses. For a record about where you come from, the guest list itself makes an argument.

Why it matters

For Classic Rock listeners, a McCartney-Starr duet built around the pre-Beatles Liverpool years carries weight that goes well beyond nostalgia. It is a document of the two surviving members of the most consequential band in rock history reflecting on shared origins while both are still active and engaged. McCartney at nearly 84 and Starr at 85 are not winding down; they are producing new work with serious collaborators. That fact alone resets expectations for what legacy artists can still deliver, and it gives The Boys of Dungeon Lane a cultural gravity that a standard late-career album would not carry.

What’s next

‘Home to Us’ releases as a single on May 8. The full album The Boys of Dungeon Lane follows on May 29 via MPL/Capitol. It is the second preview single from the record, following ‘Days We Left Behind.’

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