Learn English with Let Her Go by Passenger. Fill in the blanks in the lyrics as you listen to the song.
Lyrics
Sing-Along
Now try to sing along with the piano cover of Passenger’s Let Her Go. Remember to press the Record button below so you can listen to your recording when you’ve finished.
Song Meaning
Meaning 1
I heard this song on the radio for the first time today. I like to think of the backstory like this – it’s about a guy who breaks up with his lover because he doesn’t have the ability to recognize that he has something special with her, and he doesn’t have the courage to stay in the relationship when she starts asking for a commitment from him. So he lets her go because he feels incapable of giving himself over to what has actually become real love. The line, “Maybe one day you’ll understand why everything you touch, surely dies” speaks to this guy’s chronic inability to return the love and form a deep bond with someone else. It may be that his ideals of love are actually unrealistic (“Hoping one day you’ll make a dream last”), and he keeps choosing to let love go because he doesn’t understand that love can be a messy and difficult thing worth fighting for. But ultimately, this song is about the regret of only realising after breaking things off that he truly loved her. And of course, by the time he realises this, it will have been too late to get her back – she will have moved on to someone who can reciprocate her love. This kind of stuff is pure tragedy.
Meaning 2
This to me, is obviously a breakup song.
He is remembering her now that they are no longer together. He realizes he loved her, while he was maybe unsure or didn’t realize it while they were still a couple.
There is a lot of truth to this song since a lot of people don’t realize they were really in love until after it is over. We miss what we no longer have. Sometimes in relationships, people take significant things for granted until it’s too late to go back.
He is taking responsibility for the relationship ending with lines like:
And you let her go
Maybe one day you’ll understand why
Everything you touch, oh it dies
You don’t truly know happiness until you’ve seen the pits of despair. I thought he was singing “You only know your lover when you let her go” which also makes some sense. It seems you learn a lot about someone during the breakup period too. Sometimes it’s even more telling than the relationship itself.
The song alludes to the fact the protagonist is still reeling from the breakup. It’s fresh because he has an attitude that paints the relationship as better than perhaps it really was. People have a tendency to idealize the past.
