Paul McCartney recruited a familiar face for his new album: fellow Beatle Ringo Starr. “Home to Us,” the pair’s first-ever duet, is the latest preview from McCartney’s forthcoming The Boys of Dungeon Lane. The song also features Chrissie Hynde and Sharleen Spiteri on backing vocals. Listen to it below.
“Home to Us” is the only track on The Boys of Dungeon Lane that includes a guest drummer. It was originally built around a drum track McCartney and producer Andrew Watt asked Starr to record for the album. Starr had initially planned to only sing a line or two, but McCartney upped the ante, asking him to come on for a full duet. “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,” McCartney shared in a statement. “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.”
The song is McCartney and Starr’s first collaboration since 2023’s Beatles’ track “Now and Then,” a song based around a vocal run from John Lennon that was unearthed in 1994. Although the idea of building on the vocal was initially tabled due to poor audio quality, AI technology introduced to McCartney and Starr by director Peter Jackson allowed them to make use of it. It was billed as the “final” Beatles song, and arrived alongside a music video directed by Jackson.
The Boys of Dungeon Lane, which is due out on May 29 on MPL/Capital, has been framed as an autobiographical survey of McCartney’s childhood in post-war Liverpool. He released a lead single, “Days We Left Behind,” back in March.
Correction: A previous version of this story listed the wrong number of solo albums Paul McCartney has released. It has since been updated.