Ratings History

Album

All the Little Lights

Information

"Let Her Go" is a song by singer-songwriter Passenger. It was recorded at Sydney's Linear Recording and co-produced by Passenger (as Mike Rosenberg) and Chris Vallejo. The recording features Australian musicians Stu Larsen, Georgia Mooney, Stu Hunter, Cameron Undy, and Glenn Wilson. Let Her Go was released on July 24, 2012 as the second single from Passenger's fourth album, All the Little Lights.

The song became a sleeper hit, achieving international success and topping the charts in many countries around the world. As of July 2014, it has sold over a million digital copies in the UK, and over 4 million in the US. In 2014, the song was nominated for the Brit Award for British Single of the Year, and won Passenger the British Academy's Ivor Novello Award for Most Performed Work. In 2023, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the song. Passenger released a remix version with Ed Sheeran. The song became a hit first in the Netherlands after Dave, a Dutch fan, e-mailed Passenger expressing his wish to introduce the song to some Dutch radio stations, claiming it could be a hit there. This resulted in the song trending on Dutch stations and finding enormous commercial success with the Dutch public. The song reached #2 in the Dutch Top 40 in November 2012, spending a total of 4 non-consecutive weeks at that position. The next month that year, it reached #1. Since 2013, and after initial success in the Netherlands, Let Her Go has reached #1 in 19 countries.

Let Her Go debuted at #95 on the Billboard Hot 100 on the week of August 17, 2013 & after a nearly 4 month climb reached the top 10 for the first time, rising from #11 to #10 on the week of December 7, 2013 & becoming the first top 10 single for Passenger. It slipped to #13 the following week but re-entered the top 10 at #9 the week after, it peaked at #5 two months later, in February 2014, becoming Passenger's first top 5 aswell.
The song is currently certified 6× Platinum by the RIAA, it ranked at #97 on Billboard's Year-End list of 2013 & at #19 on the Year-End list of 2014.

The music video was uploaded on the day after the single, directed and produced by the Australian video artist Dave Jensen and Tavic. It shows the stage being prepared for a Passenger concert, with footage of Passenger performance with his backing band and shots of the audience present reacting. As of March 2026, the video has received over 4 billion views on the video-sharing website YouTube, making it the 29th most viewed video ever on the site.

British singer Birdy recorded a cover version called "Let Him Go" in 2013 on BBC Radio 1's Live Lounge. An unreleased acoustic version of the song was donated to support college radio in the USA on the 2013 College Radio Day Vol. 2 album. The song was limited to being on only the CD version of the album (only 1,500 copies have been pressed). In August 2014, Glen Templeton made a country cover of the song. American trance singer JES released her cover version of the song titled "Let Him Go" in 2019. The song is sampled heavily in Central Cee's 2022 single "Let Go".

Let Her Go is regularly confused with Idina Menzel's hit song "Let It Go" from the 2013 Disney Animation film Frozen. At the 2018 Newport Folk Festival, Passenger introduced himself to the crowd, then explained: "I've only had one hit, so that's a bit embarrassing. And it's called Let Her Go, not Let It Go from Frozen. Amazing how people get them mixed up. She's a Disney princess, and I'm an Englishman with a beard." Passenger again joked about the long-running confusion while performing at the Fox Oakland Theatre in September 2024 as part of his Anniversary Tour. The song could also be confused with James Bay's 2014 song "Let It Go" of the same name as Idina's Frozen soundtrack song.

Let Her Go was used in a Budweiser commercial shown during Super Bowl XLVIII entitled "Puppy Love", which showed the friendship between a Labrador Retriever puppy and one of the Budweiser Clydesdales. It was used also in the season 7 finale of the Canadian television show Heartland as the send-off song and in "500 Years of Solitude", the 100th episode of The Vampire Diaries. Bluegrass band the Travelin' McCourys recorded the song at a Nashville studio, the Butcher Shoppe releasing the version on January 13, 2017. Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.