Songfacts®:

• This song is about the mixed feelings a mother feels when her child goes off to college. There's pride, but also tears because it's never easy letting go. The lyric takes us into her mindset: she tells herself how great it will be to get more time in the garden and read some books, but she's really not ready to watch her child leave home.
  
  On the Songfacts Podcast, Suzy Bogguss said: "I had to fight with the record label because at the time they thought it was too pop for the record that I was making, but it ended up being a big hit for me and giving me some great stories from folks that identified with this song through the years."
• Bogguss' husband, the musician/producer Doug Crider, wrote this song with Matt Rollings, who has played keyboards on tracks by Lyle Lovett, Willie Nelson, Shania Twain and many others. Bogguss and Crider got married in 1986; they met in Nashville when she was a demo singer and he was a recording engineer.
• At the time, Bogguss didn't have any children, but she did experience the sentiments in this song when her son, Benton Crider, graduated from DePauw University in Indiana in 2017.
• Landing at #6 on the Country chart, "Letting Go" is one of Bogguss' most popular songs. It was released as a single from her third album, Aces, which sold over a million copies in America. The album was produced by Jimmy Bowen, who was an artist in the '50s but switched roles in the '60s to produce acts like Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Later in his career, he worked with a number of country acts, including Garth Brooks and Reba McEntire.
• The music video was directed by Deaton Flanigen, whose credits include "All Summer Long" by Kid Rock and "Eight Second Ride" by Jake Owen. In the clip, we the mother going through an emotional blender as her daughter heads to college.