The Unlikely Reign of “Choosin’ Texas”

Ella Langley, a twenty-seven-year-old country singer from Hope Hull, Alabama, with bangs so terrifically thick and ponderous they evoke dense, pre-thunderstorm air, recently broke a major Billboard record: her single “Choosin’ Texas” is now the longest-running non-holiday song by a solo woman artist, having spent seventeen weeks atop the Hot 100. (Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” part hymn, part shopping banger, has logged twenty-two weeks at No. 1 since its release in 1994—long may she run.) “Choosin’ Texas” first crested the chart in February. But it’s been sitting at No. 1 since July 4th, all but guaranteeing its eventual anointment as this year’s Song of the Summer, a specious title that nonetheless gets critics salivating, in part because there are so few opportunities to witness cultural omnipresence these days—to have a pop song mean something to a large group of people at the exact point in the year when we’ve been collectively humbled by heat and fresh tomatoes and the slow degradation of routine. Music takes on a different purpose by mid-August—who isn’t feeling a little lazy and crooked by now, spiritually overserved and ready for a nap? Crank the boom box; head to the hammock.

“Choosin’ Texas” is music for decelerating and giving in. I liked the song the first time I heard it, but—and this feels crucial to its longevity—I liked it even more on subsequent listens. The track is built to indulge and honor repetition; it’s soft and easy, with the loose, broken-in feel of vintage denim. In this way, it is almost antithetical to the punchy, overthought, and self-referential pop of recent summers. “Choosin’ Texas” opens in medias res with a lazy-river guitar riff, at the precise moment a relationship is starting to tip toward trouble; Langley has a drawl that sounds youthful and dewy, yet satisfyingly coarse. The song details how it feels—bad—to suddenly realize that someone is falling out of love with you. The central tension of the tune is her man’s undying allegiance to Texas (I can’t stop picturing Tim Riggins, the brooding and frighteningly handsome antihero of “Friday Night Lights,” waving a half-empty Lone Star bottle around and vowing “Texas forever”), though, of course, here “Texas” becomes a stand-in for any siren call. “Choosin’ Texas,” which was co-written by Miranda Lambert, Luke Dick, Joybeth Taylor, and Langley, is resigned, yielding, almost passive; it seems to accept the inevitability of the situation—that, to borrow an odious old chestnut, the heart wants what it wants. “She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way / He’s two steppin’ ’round the room / And judgin’ by the smile that’s written on his face / There’s nothin’ I can do,” she sings. It reminds me, lyrically, of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” and Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own,” two iconic, aching songs about losing your grip on a lover. There’s no real villain to denounce or berate, and that is perhaps the most heartbreaking part of all. “It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see,” Langley sings on the chorus. “A cowboy always finds a way to leave.”

Historically, summer has not been a time to sit around contemplating the futility of any given romantic entanglement, which makes “Choosin’ Texas” anomalous in the canon: it’s not a horny, vivacious bop (“Crazy in Love,” 2003), or a galvanizing self-empowerment anthem (“SexyBack,” 2006); it’s not brimming with dumb hope (“Call Me Maybe,” 2012) or an ode to blowing off steam (“Woke up drunk at 10 A.M. / We gon’ do this shit again,” Shaboozey declared, on “A Bar Song (Tipsy),” in 2024). Langley has a second hit in the Top Five right now: “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” a plaintive duet with Morgan Wallen. It’s another sad, dusty tune about how love turns us inside out. Langley’s voice, which is emotive but steady, seems unusually well suited to this sort of doleful yearning.

I found the overwhelming popularity of “Choosin’ Texas” curious at first—it’s essentially a song about moping, during what is allegedly our least mopey time of year—but I came to understand it as a rejoinder to anguish. Sometimes, for reasons we don’t understand and can’t control, shit goes south; rather than thrashing against those inevitabilities, maybe it’s better to accept the minor defeats. “I know that his mind wasn’t ever gonna change,” Langley shrugs on the bridge. In the music video, she hastily arranges a ride back to Tennessee with a bar band led by Miranda Lambert. “Sounds like he ain’t the one for you,” Lambert counsels Langley as they share a drink in the alley behind a club, near an idling van. As John Steinbeck once wrote in a letter to his son, who was in the throes of his own romantic overwhelm, “Nothing good gets away.” ♦