A small late-night prayer that lets love loosen its grip, yet refuses to let the feeling fade
Tucked quietly onto side two of Crossword Puzzle in 1973, Let Your Love Go by The Partridge Family never had the flashing lights of a hit single. It wasn’t released to radio, and it never appeared in an episode of the television series. It simply slipped into the track list—ninth song on a modestly charting album that peaked at No. 167 on the Billboard Top LPs chart—waiting for anyone patient enough to let the needle run all the way through. And yet, for those who do find it, this little song feels like sitting alone with the past for a moment, admitting that sometimes the only way to keep love alive is to stop holding it so tightly.
On paper, the song looks like a familiar Partridge creation. Let Your Love Go was written by the seasoned trio Wes Farrell, Danny Janssen, and Bobby Hart, architects of so many of the group’s later, more emotionally shaded songs. It was recorded on September 4, 1972 at the Hollywood sessions that also produced Sunshine, just as the first wave of Partridge fame was settling into something softer and less frantic. At a brief two minutes and seventeen seconds, the track is almost over before it begins. But within that short span, it says something quietly profound about how love changes—and how people change with it.
Musically, the song is classic early-’70s studio craft. The rhythm section moves with gentle assurance; the guitars chime without insisting on themselves; the keyboards fill in the corners like warm lamplight in a familiar room. The arrangement is neither bright bubble-gum nor heavy drama. It feels like a conversation at the end of a long day, when voices are low and honesty comes a little easier. At the center sits the voice associated with David Cassidy—a touch less boyish now, a shade more reflective—riding the melody with that mixture of clarity and vulnerability that defined so much of his best work.
The idea at the heart of Let Your Love Go is disarmingly simple. This isn’t a song about first crushes or sudden infatuation; it sounds more like the moment when someone realizes that love cannot breathe if it is locked in a tight fist. There is an acceptance here, a willingness to loosen the grip, to stop trying to control every outcome. The title itself feels like advice given late at night over a kitchen table: let the feeling go where it needs to go, and if it returns to you in a kinder form, so much the better. If it doesn’t, at least you didn’t break it by clinging.
Placed on Crossword Puzzle, the track lives among other songs of emotional transition—Now That You Got Me Where You Want Me, It Means I’m In Love With You, It Sounds Like You’re Saying Hello—pieces that reflect a group stepping away from pure teen fantasy and edging toward more mature shades of longing and release. Unlike the earlier Partridge albums, where nearly every track found its way into the television series, several songs on this record, including Let Your Love Go, never appeared on screen at all. In a way, that absence gives them a different kind of intimacy; they belong more to the listener’s private world than to the shared world of the show.
For someone coming to the song with years behind them, its emotional tone may feel uncannily familiar. It evokes those moments in life when the hardest thing to do was not to fight for love, but to stop fighting—when the kindest act was to step back a little, to give the other person room to breathe, to trust that what was real would find its own way forward. The track doesn’t preach this; it simply rests in it. The melody moves with gentle inevitability, like a train pulling slowly out of a station, leaving you on the platform with your memories and a strange mixture of sorrow and relief.
There is a particular tenderness in how the song balances resignation with hope. Let Your Love Go is not a bitter farewell, nor is it an overly sweet promise that everything will magically work out. It sits somewhere in between, where most real lives unfold: acknowledging that something has changed, yet choosing to believe that love, once released from fear and possessiveness, might become something gentler—if not between these two people, then in the way they move through the world afterward.
Within the broader story of The Partridge Family, this track remains a quiet, almost hidden corner. No iconic bus, no laugh track, no chart-topping statistics—just a short, sincere song from a late-period album that asked to be listened to all the way through. And perhaps that is its deepest charm. Let Your Love Go feels like a message written not for the rush of its own moment, but for anyone who would find it later, with a few more lines on their face and a better understanding of how tightly the heart can hold on—and how good it can feel, at the right time, to gently let go.