Ringo Starr Wrote His 1st Beatles Song in a ‘Fit of Lethargy’

Ringo Starr rarely wrote or sang Beatles songs. He preferred to play the drums and support his bandmates. Even after The Beatles broke up, his bandmates often wrote him songs for his solo albums. Still, he had several writing credits with the band. John Lennon insinuated that Starr got his first solo writing credit with the band because he was bored.

John Lennon shared how Ringo Starr wrote his first Beatles song

In 1968, Starr received his first solo writing credit with The Beatles with “Don’t Pass Me By.” The song appeared on the White Album. Starr said he wrote it while lazing around his house.

“I wrote ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ when I was sitting round at home,” Starr said in The Beatles Anthology. “I only play three chords on the guitar and three on the piano. I was fiddling with the piano — I just bang away — and then if a melody comes and some words, I just have to keep going. That’s how it happened: I was just sitting at home alone and ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ arrived. We played it with a country attitude.”

Lennon was blunt when he described Starr’s writing process.

“We’ve just done two tracks. The second one is Ringo’s first song,” he said. “He composed it himself in a fit of lethargy.”

The song may have been born of boredom, but Starr said it was exciting to finally have a song of his own.

“It was great to get my first song down, one that I had written,” he said. “It was a very exciting time for me and everyone was really helpful and recording that crazy violinist was a thrilling moment.”

He accidentally plagiarized the actual first song he wrote

Before The Beatles released “Don’t Pass Me By,” Starr spent several hours writing what he viewed as his best song ever. The trouble was, someone else had already written it.

“Ringo’s got a funny story of the most brilliant song he ever wrote,” Paul McCartney said, per the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “He spent three hours writing a very famous Bob Dylan song.”

His mistake made his bandmates laugh, but McCartney said this was surprisingly easy to do.

“We all fell about and laughed,” he said. “That can happen. You say, ‘This is so great,’ and someone says, ‘Yeah, it’s number one at the moment.’ ‘Ah, that’s where I heard it.’”

Ringo Starr’s bandmates typically wrote Beatles songs for him

While Starr did have some writing credits, his bandmates typically wrote for him. McCartney said that writing songs for Starr posed a unique challenge.

“It was pretty much co-written, John and I doing a work song for Ringo, a little craft job,” McCartney said of “With a Little Help From My Friends.” “I always saw those as the equivalent of writing a James Bond film theme. It was a challenge, it was something out of the ordinary for us because we actually had to write in a key for Ringo and you had to be a little tongue in cheek.”

McCartney is still writing songs for Starr. He gave him the song “Feeling the Sunlight” for his 2023 album Rewind Forward.