"Ticket to Ride" is a song by the English rock band the Beatles, written primarily by John Lennon and credited to Lennon–McCartney. Issued as a single in April 1965, it became the Beatles' seventh consecutive number 1 hit in the United Kingdom and their third consecutive number 1 hit (and eighth in total) in the United States, and similarly topped national charts in Canada, Australia and Ireland. The song was included on their 1965 album Help!. Recorded at EMI Studios in London in February that year, the track marked a progression in the Beatles' work through the incorporation of drone and harder-sounding instrumentation relative to their previous releases. Among music critics, Ian MacDonald describes the song as "psychologically deeper than anything the Beatles had recorded before" and "extraordinary for its time".
"Ticket to Ride" appears in a sequence in the Beatles' second feature film, Help!, directed by Richard Lester. Live performances by the band were included in the Beatles at Shea Stadium concert film, on the live album documenting their concerts at the Hollywood Bowl, and on the 1996 Anthology 2 box set. In 1969, "Ticket to Ride" was covered by the Carpenters, whose version peaked at number 54 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Composition
"Ticket to Ride" was primarily written by John Lennon, and credited to Lennon–McCartney. In 1965, Lennon claimed that the song was "three-quarters mine and Paul [McCartney] changed it a bit. He said let's alter the tune." However, speaking in 1980, Lennon said that McCartney's contribution was limited to "the way Ringo [Starr] played the drums" on the recording. In his 1997 authorised biography, Paul McCartney contradicts this, providing an account more similar to Lennon's 1965 assessment: "we sat down and wrote it together … give him 60 percent of it … we sat down together and worked on that for a full three-hour songwriting session."
The song is written in the key of A major. The structure of the composition is in an expanded variation of the AABA pop song format, with eight bars of verse and eight bars of chorus forming the A section, and a nine-bar primary bridge forming the B section. and supports a melody that author Ian MacDonald terms "raga-like".
The song's coda features a change of tempo. In the view of musicologist Walter Everett, the latter section marks a progression on previous Beatles songs that similarly revisit aspects of a composition when ending with a coda. In the case of "Ticket to Ride", the section consists of a repeated refrain similar to the last line of the chorus ("My baby don't care"), played over a constant A major chord and set to the double-time rhythm used in the bridge. Lennon said this closing section was one of his "favourite bits" in the song. He also claimed that "Ticket to Ride" was the first heavy metal record ever made. According to MacDonald, the track's heavy sound may have been influenced by Lennon and George Harrison's first encounter with LSD, the precise date for which varies among Beatles biographers. Author Simon Philo calls the song "avant-garde masquerading as pop".
While the lyrics describe a girl "riding out of the life of the narrator", the inspiration of the title phrase is unclear, as is the meaning of the song. Gaby Whitehill and Andrew Trendall of Gigwise have interpreted the song to be about a woman leaving her boyfriend to become a prostitute.