Recording: I’ll Still Love You by Ringo Starr

Cherokee Studios, Los Angeles
Producer: Arif Mardin

Ringo Starr recorded ‘I’ll Still Love You’ for his fifth studio album, Ringo’s Rotogravure, on 24 May 1976.

I also asked George to write one, but there was an old one of his that was never released by anybody that I always loved – I was on the session when it was recorded – so in the end I asked him if instead of writing one could I have that old one. He said fine, it saved him a job. It’s called ‘I’ll Still Love You’.

George Harrison originally titled it ‘Whenever’, and later ‘When Every Song Is Sung’. He recorded it multiple times but remained unhappy with the results.

When I wrote ‘When Every Song Is Sung’ I had it titled ‘Whenever’. I got the chord sequence and ‘when every song is sung’ were the first words to come out of my mouth and it developed from there. It was one of those that I tried several times to record: Ronnie Spector, Phil’s wife, had a go at it; Cilla Black also – in fact I started to produce it for Cilla as a single but we didn’t finish it. We also did it with Leon Russell and his wife Mary and in the end Ringo recorded it. As Shirley Bassey once suggested in a newspaper, after having a ‘hit’ with ‘Something’, that she and I could be like Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach, if we got together, I thought this would be a good one for her…

Harrison first recorded it during the All Things Must Pass sessions in 1970, when it was known simply as ‘I Love You’. He was unable to attend the recording session for Starr’s version as he had hepatitis.