Songfacts®:

• "Why" is a track from Ringo Starr's 2026 album Long Long Road, his second full collaboration with producer and songwriter T Bone Burnett following 2025's Look Up. Burnett wrote "Why" entirely by himself and contributed to six of the album's 10 tracks.
• The song is built around a simple string of questions: "Why do we lie? Why do we cry? Why do we deny?" There are questions here that people have been asking for centuries, though Starr decided one of Burnett's original lines was taking the gloom a bit too far. Before recording, Starr put his foot down over a particularly depressing phrase.
  
  "One of the saddest lines was 'Why do we die?' I wouldn't sing it!" Starr told People. "I made it 'Why can't we fly' and then sent it back to him! [laughs] But that's country, isn't it? Like, you're in the bar, the wife's left, the dog's dead and you don't have any change for the jukebox. I got into [the genre] with Hank Williams and all those people. There was a sad aspect to country music."
  
  Burnett's original line leaned into mortality, a staple theme in country and Americana, but Starr steered it toward something brighter. Swapping "die" for "fly" keeps the song grounded in Starr's trademark peace-and-love optimism.
• Burnett wrote the track with one of his early musical heroes in mind. "With 'Why' I was thinking of a Buddy Holly song," he told Uncut magazine. "But I didn't want to impersonate The Beatles or anything like that."
• Burnett produced the whole album, with Daniel Tashian and Bruce Sugar as co-producers. The recording session followed the same long-distance routine used for most of Long Long Road: Burnett and his core studio band recorded the instrumental backing tracks at his home studio in Nashville and sent them to Los Angeles. Starr added his drum parts and lead vocals at his home studio, then sent the files back to Nashville for final mixing.
• The full lineup of musicians on "Why" includes:
  
  Billy Strings: harmony vocal, acoustic guitar
  Daniel Tashian: background vocals
  Molly Tuttle: acoustic guitar
  Dennis Crouch: bass
  David Mansfield: electric guitar
  Patrick Warren: keyboards and orchestration
  Michael Piersante: handclaps
  Mike Stankiewicz: percussion
  
  Several of these players share long histories with Burnett:
  
  David Mansfield and Burnett go all the way back to 1975, when both were teenagers recruited for Bob Dylan's famous Rolling Thunder Revue tour. After that tour ended, they formed the country-rock group The Alpha Band with fellow Revue alum Steven Soles, releasing three albums between 1976 and 1978. Mansfield has been a frequent collaborator on Burnett's projects ever since.
  
  Dennis Crouch played bass on several 2021 Bob Dylan sessions produced by Burnett (including new cuttings of "Blowin' In The Wind" and "Masters Of War" for the Ionic Originals project). He also played on Starr and Burnett's first joint record, Look Up.
  
  Patrick Warren regularly works with Burnett on film and TV scores, including FX's The Old Man (2022) and the 2024 film Downtown Owl.
  
  Billy Strings and Molly Tuttle represent the younger side of the album's roster. Both are leading lights in modern bluegrass who came in as featured guest players across Long Long Road.
• "Why" is Track 5 on Long Long Road. The record is Starr's third full dip into country and Americana, following Beaucoups of Blues (1970) and Look Up (2025). It hit #2 on both the UK Americana and UK Country Albums charts, while making the Top 20 on the main album charts in Austria, Germany, Scotland, and Switzerland.
• The album's title grew out of Starr's personal journey across the decades. "This album is called Long Long Road because I had a long road to here from Liverpool," he told Uncut. "For the last year or so, I've been thinking about where I came from and where I ended up in LA. I love LA. But as a kid, you don't know where you're going to go. You make a move and sometimes you make the right move. My whole point lately is making the right move, not the left move. And I'm left-handed."
  
  For Ringo, that journey comes down to staying positive and keeping moving. "Play it a bit faster!" he told People. "I'm not all that good at advice but move forward. That's the thing. Move forward and move on - on down the road. That's why this [album] is Long Long Road. I was reflecting on myself. This has been a long, long road with a few bad moments but lots of great moments. I'm blessed."