Ringo Starr on ‘Rewind Forward,’ writing country music, the AI-assisted final Beatles track and more

LOS ANGELES — There are rock stars, and then there is Ringo Starr — drummer for the Beatles, award-winning soloist, photographer, narrator, actor, activist. To call him prolific would almost shortchange his accomplishments. But it also feels right.

“Rewind Forward,” out October 13, is his fourth extended play release in three years.

“I’ve loved EPs since they first came out in the ’60s,” he says of the format. “And then I heard the kids are making EPs and thought, ‘That’s good!’”

The title is a classic “Ringoism,” as John Lennon used to refer to his malapropisms, an unusual phrase ripped from the same mind that came up with “A Hard Day’s Night” and “Tomorrow Never Knows.”

Assigning profundity to it came later. “I think it means that, you know, you’re sitting still for a while. You rewind and you find out ‘I was a much better person then,’ or ‘this was working for me better then,’ he says. You don’t have to ever live in the past, but just check it occasionally.”

“Of course, I’m making all this up,” he jokes.

Starr got a little help from his friends on the four track EP, a collection of life-affirming songs co-penned by Starr’s engineer frequent co-writer Bruce Sugar, Steve Lukather of the All Starr Band, Toto’s Joe Williams, Benmont Tench and Mike Campbell of Tom Petty’s Heartbreakers, and many more.

“Feeling the Sunlight” was written by Beatle Paul McCartney, who Starr says he “FaceTimes twice a month” and hangs out with whenever he is in London, or McCartney is in LA.

“When he sent the track, he’d actually done the drums, so we had to take them off,” he says, laughing.

If there is a thematic throughline to “Rewind Forward,” or any of Starr’s solo work, it’s a kind of unrelenting optimism —…