Ella Langley’s hit song Choosin’ Texas has made Hot 100 history, spending 23 weeks on the chart and breaking the record for the longest-running No 1 song in the chart’s 68-year old history. The track, which was released last October as the lead single on the 27-year-old singer and songwriter’s album Dandelion, has surpassed Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You, which topped the charts for 22 weeks. Choosin’ Texas first appeared on the Hot 100 last November.
Co-written by Miranda Lambert, Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor, the heartbreak track’s success has been described by Langley as “surreal”. For so long, you’re like, ‘Alright, one song at a time, one record at a time.’ But with this one song – and they’ve done it continuously for me – but really with ‘Choosin’ Texas’ … man, have they taken ahold of it. It’s wild,” Langley told in an interview earlier this year.
The song follows a Tennessee-based narrator watching her partner leave for another woman in Texas, transforming a familiar story of heartbreak into one that occurs not only between three people but between two places. Describing its origins, Langley told Billboard: “I was on a writers retreat with Miranda, our first time writing together. At a young age, she had a pet kangaroo.
She told me how she got pulled over once with the kangaroo in the passenger seat. The kangaroo got her out of a ticket and she said, ‘Of course, I had Texas plates, too.’ I went, ‘Well, she’s from Texas, I can tell … ’ Forty-five minutes later, we had the song written.” Victoria Banks, a Nashville-based songwriter instructor at Belmont University, pointed to the song’s simplicity and familiarity as a reason for its success.
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