Ringo Starr Jokes His Kids 'Get Fed Up' When He Talks Retirement: 'You've Told Us That for the Last 10 Years' (Exclusive)

With a hit new album under his belt, a concert special filmed at the Ryman Auditorium now streaming and a slew of upcoming tour dates, Ringo Starr is as busy as ever. So it’s fair enough that when he brings up talk of slowing down, his three kids consider him something like the drummer who cried wolf.

“Sometimes when I finish a tour, I’m like, ‘That’s the end for me.’ And all my children say, ‘Oh, Dad, you’ve told us that for the last 10 years.’ And they get fed up with me,” Starr tells PEOPLE in this week’s issue. “I do feel, ‘Oh, that’s got to be enough,’ and then I get a phone call: ‘We’ve got a few gigs if you’re interested.’ Okay, we’re off again!”

The drummer, 84, will set off again with his All Starr Band in June for a 10-date tour, and in September, they’ll play six shows as part of a Las Vegas residency at The Venetian Theatre. Starr — who is dad to sons Zak, 59, and Jason, 57, and daughter Lee, 54, with late ex-wife Maureen and stepdad to wife Barbara Bach's kids Francesca, 56, and Gianni Gregorini, 52 — has played with his namesake band since 1989, and the current lineup includes Steve Lukather, Colin Hay, Warren Ham, Hamish Stuart, Gregg Bissonette and Buck Johnson.

“In those days, I had a phone book, so I found guys who were musicians and I’d call them,” he says of the band’s early days. “We opened in Texas in a field and it was great. And we’ve been doing it ever since because I love to play live. I love the audience, I know they love me and we have a great time.”

For Starr, the upcoming shows will be an opportunity to show off his new country album Look Up, which came out in January. The record marked the former Beatle's second country effort, after 1970’s Beaucoups of Blues, and became his most successful record in years, cracking the Top 10 on Billboard’s album sales chart, and earning the musician his first No. 1 album in his native U.K.

“It sort of took its own way. We can make the right turns sometimes,” he says of making the record. “It’s working out really well. I’ve been surprised a lot lately.”

The “Photograph” singer is quick to credit producer T Bone Burnett with bringing the album to life. Though the two had met before, their paths crossed again in Los Angeles, where George Harrison’s widow Olivia was doing a reading of a poetry book she’d written for the late Beatle.

“[I told him] ‘I’m making EPs and if you have a track you think would be good for me, why don’t you send it?’ And that’s how it started, just very open,” Starr says. “He sent me this beautiful track, and it was a country track. Who’d have known?”

Before long, Burnett had presented Starr with nine songs ready to go, and Look Up was in motion.

“For fun at the time when we were making this, I thought, well Beyoncé had a country [album]. How beautiful is that? And I’ve got mine,” he says. “So I thought, ‘Well, I’ll call it Be-Yond-Say. But I was talked out of it. I just thought it’d be fun. It’s now called Look Up, which I do love because it’s better looking up than looking down.”

Though going the country route may seem unexpected, the music is a lifelong love for Starr, who was first introduced to the genre as a teenager growing up in the port city of Liverpool.

“A lot of [young] guys went into the Merchant Navy, and they would go around the world, but one of the stops would be America. And they’d bring back all these records, so we got to listen to them,” he recalls. “We’d buy ‘em off them when they went broke.”

With the Beatles, he recorded a cover of Buck Owens’ country hit “Act Naturally” in 1965, and co-wrote the band’s country songs “What Goes On” and “Don’t Pass Me By.”

And when he took the stage at Nashville’s revered Ryman Auditorium for two shows in January, he even country-fied some Beatles classics, including “With a Little Help from My Friends.” The shows, which were combined into a two-hour long special, Ringo & Friends at the Ryman (now streaming on Paramount+), included help from some of his own friends, including Sheryl Crow, Emmylou Harris and Mickey Guyton.

“I love that I’ve got a freedom to make a right turn,” he says of finding new ways to keep things fresh.

For more on Ringo Starr, pick up the latest issue of PEOPLE, on newsstands Friday, or subscribe here.