Songfacts®:

• When Morgan James and her husband, Doug Wamble, were putting together her Nobody's Fool album, they wanted to write a song to help their friends who were going through a tough time with physical and mental health crises. The result was "I'll Be Holding On," an emotional track about unconditional friendship.
  
  James told Songfacts in a 2023 interview: "I remember Doug and I sitting down and saying, 'Let's write something. If we could write something inspirational for them, what would we want them to hear?' It's the most powerful tool we have. It's the only tool, sometimes, it feels like. We wanted to write something that was unabashedly loving, hopeful, and inspiring. It's not something I usually write. We wanted to lean into that and pour our worry and our grief into writing something like that."
• Directed by Jonah Z Helms, the emotional music video finds James embarking on a road trip and grieving the loss of a close friend.
  
  "Jonah wanted to create a video that was so specific to one idea and yet so universal that one person could watch it and process their own grief by watching it. Something really deep and emotionally charged," she told Songfacts.
  
  They shot the clip over a three-day period on an actual road trip with James and her friend, actress Pearl Sun. "I went on a road trip in a '72 Bronco and we filmed it," she continued. "I think that's what adds to making the reality of the friendship and trying to say goodbye to somebody you can't say goodbye to. I wanted people to come away with that. The song and the video are about the people we can't bear to lose and what it is like to move through life without them."
• The video is dedicated to Lanie Zipoy, a filmmaker who was killed in a car accident around the time James was recording the album. Wamble and Zipoy were longtime friends who grew up together in Memphis and supported each other's careers. Wamble's first film score composition was for Zipoy's feature-film directorial debut, The Subject (2020).
• This features backing vocals from The Morgan State University Choir of Baltimore, Maryland.
• Nobody's Fool is James' fourth studio release, but the soul singer also rounds out her discography with full album covers of iconic LPs like Joni Mitchell's Blue, The Beatles' White Album and Jeff Buckley's Grace. She channeled the latter artist on Nobody's Fool, covering Buckley's "Everybody Here Wants You."