Reception
Authors Chip Madinger and Mark Easter called "Letting Go" "one of the best songs on the LP." Robert Rodriguez called it "a strong track topped with a full slab of brass" and noted that it was "one of the Wings' onstage highlights." Authors Roy Carr and Tony Tyler described the song as one of the few "genuinely potent" tracks on Venus and Mars but with respect to the single declare that McCartney "should have taken his advice and let go. This seeks to be composedly heavy but merely succeeds in attaining a considerable degree of ponderosity." In the book The Rough Guide to the Beatles, Chris Ingham considered "Letting Go" to be "an inert sludge rocker," calling it "a disastrous choice for a single."
The song was performed during the Wings over America tour in 1976, and was included on the live album Wings over America and on the concert film, Rockshow. Larry Rohter of The Washington Post described the performance on Wings Over America as "rollicking" and "exciting." Ben Fong-Torres described McCartney's live performance of the song as "reaching back for some of that Little Richard inspiration." McCartney played it again during his 2010 Up and Coming Tour.
Read more about this topic: Letting Go (Wings Song)
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)