Songfacts®:

• This song likens the timeline of a typical romance to a ride on a carousel. It starts off with the boy and the girl on their horses, with him in hot pursuit. Round and round they go, up and down they ride, but just when he thinks he's getting close, she gets off the ride. It seems he's lost his chance, but when she drops some prizes she won before, he makes his move. Now they can ride the carousel next to each other.
• The Hollies had a string of hits by this point, but most came from outside writers. With "On A Carousel," band members Graham Nash, Allan Clarke, and Tony Hicks used what they had learned to construct a clever and effective pop song. Speaking with Bruce Pollock, Nash explained how it came together. "I remember doing 'On A Carousel' in a bar room in Margate, this seaside town in England," he said. "Somebody would say, 'hey, carousel,' then it would go round and round and we'd end up with a song. Everything was pretty light, lyrically shallow. So, you would be able to think of something and write a pop song to it. You could really manufacture songs about anything. You develop a vocabulary of hooks and you swing two hooks together. It's a technique that can be learned. I don't think anybody just naturally writes that kind of song."
  
  A year later, Nash left the group, eager to write songs that were more profound and sometimes political. He found kindred spirits in David Crosby and Stephen Stills, with whom he formed Crosby, Stills & Nash.
• The Hollies had three talented vocalists in Nash, Clarke, and Hicks. On this track, Nash sings the first verse solo, but Clarke joins him for the rest of the song. The three of them fill in the cracks with rich harmonies.
• Joni Mitchell wrote "The Circle Game," a song that also uses the carousel metaphor to tell a story, in 1967, the same year this was released. Nash and Mitchell ended up having a very colorful, up-and-down romance, starting in 1969. The 1970 CSN song "Our House" is about the place where they lived together.
• The Hollies fanclub magazine, which later became a newsletter, was called "Carousel" in reference to this song.
• The B-side is The Hollies' first attempt at psychedelia, a song called "All The World Is Love."
• When the Hollies recorded this in 1967 they were filmed by Granada Television for a documentary about the pop business.
• This plays at the end of the 2014 Mad Men episode "The Monolith," recalling Don Draper's pitch in an earlier episode for the Kodak carousel slide projector.
• The earliest known record of a carousel is a Byzantine etching from 500 AD which shows riders swinging in baskets tied to a central pole.