Listen to Karen Carpenter’s isolated vocal for The Beatles cover ‘Ticket to Ride’
The idea of an artist releasing a debut album jam-packed with covers of other people’s songs seems mad by today’s standards, but back in the 1960s, it was not uncommon for popular groups to do just that. A good song was, after all, a good song – and The Beatles wrote some of the best. Below, you can find an acapella version of The Carpenter’s take on ‘Ticket To Ride’, which appeared on their debut album.
The first Beatles song to be longer than three minutes, ‘Ticket To Ride’ was also the first track released from Help!, with the group performing the track from an Austrian ski-slope for the movie of the same name. Credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney, the authorship of the song has often been disputed, with Lennon claiming that it was almost entirely his work in one of his final interviews. “That was one of the earliest heavy-metal records made,” Lennon told All We Are Saying author David Sheff. “Paul’s contribution was the way Ringo played the drums.”
Paul, meanwhile, held the belief that the song had been a collaborative effort. Writing in his 1994 autobiography, McCartney argued that he and John wrote the melody together: “You can hear on the record, John’s taking the melody and I’m singing harmony with it,” he writes. “We’d often work those out as we wrote them. Because John sang it, you might have to give him 60 per cent of it. It was pretty much a work job that turned out quite well. John just didn’t take the time to explain that we sat down together and worked on that song for a full three-hour songwriting session, and at the end of it all we had all the words, we had the harmonies, and we had all the little bits.”
On release, ‘Ticket to Ride’ was heralded as a departure from The Beatles’ previous material. Aside from Ringo’s unusual drum pattern and the unusually downbeat lyrics, it was just much heavier than anything The Beatles – or anyone else for that matter – had released before. But for Paul, the song’s greatest strength was that iconic double-time coda. “I think the interesting thing was a crazy ending: instead of ending like the previous verse, we changed the tempo,” Paul recalls in Many Years From Now. “We picked up one of the lines, ‘My baby don’t care’, but completely altered the melody. We almost invented the idea of a new bit of a song on the fade-out with this song; it was something specially written for the fade-out, which was very effective but it was quite cheeky and we did a fast ending. It was quite radical at the time.”
The Carpenters’ cover is perhaps a little less radical. In their hands, it became a Chopinesque ballad swaddled in syrupy strings. You can check out Karen Carpenter’s isolated vocals below.
Never Miss A Beat
The Far Out Beatles Newsletter
All the latest stories about The Beatles from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.