Ticket To Ride (album)

Ticket To Ride (album)

Ticket to Ride is the first album by the American music duo Carpenters. At the time of its initial release in 1969 under the title Offering, (with a completely different cover photo) it was a commercial failure and produced only one minor hit single, "Ticket to Ride", a ballad version of a song made famous by The Beatles. After the Carpenters' subsequent breakthrough, however, the album was reissued internationally under the name Ticket to Ride and sold moderately. The CD in the "Remastered Classics" series went out of print in March 2007. However, in Japan, the "Pack Series" released the Ticket to Ride and Close to You CDs together.

The album is far more self-contained than other Carpenters albums; excluding the orchestrations, most of the instruments were played by the duo themselves, and 10 of the 13 songs were written by Richard Carpenter and his lyricist John Bettis. It also stands out from subsequent Carpenters albums in that the lead vocals are evenly split between the two band members; on later albums, Karen Carpenter would perform the lion's share of the lead vocals.