Los Angeles, California — June 2026
The notification arrived without fanfare: a short e-mail from TIME magazine, a digital badge, and a request for a head-and-shoulders photograph. Yet for Ringo Starr—who has played to roars that once eclipsed jet engines—this small, silent message carried the weight of an arena in full scream. At eighty-five, the drummer whose laid-back pocket held together the most famous band on earth has been named to TIME’s list of the 100 most influential people in music. It is an honor that measures not decibels but endurance: six decades of rhythm that continues to pulse through playlists, remixes, and the collective memory of multiple generations.
The editors’ citation is brief but pointed. They hail the “human metronome” who translated skiffle’s shuffle into the back-beat of a cultural revolution, then spent the next half-century proving that groove can outlast fashion. They note his annual “Peace & Love” birthday livestream, his All-Starr tours that treat rivalry as invitation, and a recent EP, Look Up, recorded mostly live in a room no bigger than a modest dining room. The list features innovators in Afrobeats, K-pop, and AI-assisted composition, yet the inclusion of a Liverpool lad born before vinyl LPs became standard feels less like nostalgia than acknowledgment that influence is often a slow-burning fuse.
Starr receives the news in his Laurel Canyon studio, a space lined with Ludwig snares and black-and-white photographs of John, Paul, and George leaning over lyric sheets. “It’s lovely,” he says, eyes flicking to a framed telegram announcing the Beatles’ first U.S. number-one. “All these years later and people are still talking about the beat.” He taps an index finger against a tom head—an absentminded metronome—then shrugs, half sheepish, half proud. “I’ve been keeping time my whole life. Nice to know time decided to keep me.”
Outside the studio’s sliding door, California sunlight scatters through bougainvillea. Inside, the air carries the faint smell of cymbal polish and English tea. On one wall hangs a whiteboard scribbled with upcoming session dates: a charity single for Médecins Sans Frontières, a cameo on a jazz-rap track by a twenty-year-old producer from Atlanta, an August booking to overdub percussion on a Bollywood remix of “Here Comes the Sun.” His phone buzzes at intervals—congratulations from Joe Walsh, a thumbs-up emoji from Paul McCartney currently backstage in São Paulo, an all-caps “ABOUT BLOODY TIME” from Dave Grohl.
Influence, Starr insists, is less about what you do once than what remains reusable. He recalls a memory from 1963: the Beatles had just finished a lunchtime gig at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, and a local drummer asked how he played the snare accent on “She Loves You.” Starr demonstrated, then watched as the younger musician carried the pattern to another stage across town. “That was the first echo,” he says. “You pass a fill along and it turns into somebody else’s heartbeat.” The new TIME list feels, to him, like a recognition of those echoes—every garage-band drummer who ever learned a left-hand lead, every lo-fi hip-hop artist who sampled the tom roll from “Rain,” every stadium crowd that still claps on the two and the four because the Beatles once rewired muscle memory on live television.
Yet longevity brings questions as well as laurel wreaths. Does endurance justify continued presence, or does it risk overshadowing new voices? Starr answers by booking them. Each All-Starr Band incarnation—there have been fifteen since 1989—pairs the drummer with musicians born long after his original kit left Hamburg. “If the list means anything,” he says, “it’s that influence has to circulate.” Next summer’s lineup is rumoured to include a South Korean funk guitarist and a Mexican-American singer whose TikTok mash-up of “Octopus’s Garden” and cumbia has topped twenty million streams. “We’ll see who actually shows,” he laughs, “but the invite’s out.”
The TIME nod also aligns with a cultural moment that favors collaboration over category. Streaming algorithms push genre-fluid playlists; Metaverse concerts pair holograms with flesh-and-blood players; social movements borrow chants from songs written before protesters were born. Starr’s mantra—peace and love—sounds quaint until you witness an arena full of Gen-Z fans raise two fingers in unison during his closing bow. The magazine’s editors highlight that gesture, calling it “a non-verbal thesis statement that has outlived every diplomatic slogan of the past half-century.”
Asked how he plans to mark the recognition, Starr grins. “Probably the same way I mark every Thursday—bit of yoga, cup of tea, count in a tune.” Influence, for him, is not a pinnacle reached but a groove sustained. He lifts a drumstick, flicks the air with a phantom downbeat, and the room seems to inhale on the one. A camera crew filming B-roll for an upcoming documentary stops to listen, as if the absence of sound is itself instructive.
Awards shimmer, headlines fade, lists refresh. Yet somewhere tonight a beginner drummer will Google “Ringo fill,” replay the isolated track from “Come Together,” and try to catch the elusive pocket between pulse and swing. In that moment, the circle of influence tightens once more, and the quiet truth behind TIME’s accolade resonates: sometimes the most powerful thing a musician can do is keep the beat steady enough for everyone else to find their own timing.
