‘Choosin’ Texas’: The music phenomenon that has conquered (most of) the world
How Ella Langley’s song broke Mariah Carey’s record and became the track to have remained longest at number one in the United States
The music phenomenon of the moment is called Choosin’ Texas, an apparently innocuous country-pop song performed by Ella Langley, a 27-year-old artist from Alabama. The track, which tells the story of a love triangle in which someone inevitably gets hurt, has spent 24 weeks as the best-selling song in the United States. No song has stayed that long at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, the country’s official chart, which is calculated using a formula that incorporates streaming, download sales, and radio airplay.
The previous record, 22 weeks, was held by Mariah Carey with the Christmas hit All I Want for Christmas Is You. To underline the point: Luis Fonsi’s ubiquitous Despacito topped the chart for 16 weeks; Harry Styles’s As It Was for 15; and Whitney Houston’s I Will Always Love You for 14. The challenge for Choosin’ Texas is to hold the top spot now that Christmas is approaching and Carey’s pop carol begins to stir. Some experts are betting it will succeed. Langley’s reign looks that decisive.
The impact of Choosin’ Texas, included on Langley’s second album (Dandelion, 2026), has several offshoots. One mixes tools that fuel parts of today’s pop culture: virality and a masculinity that revels in its own chauvinism. From this have emerged the Ella Fellas, straight men proud to show their fandom for Langley: they record videos lip-syncing to Choosin’ Texas, host Ella Fellas parties and film themselves at the singer’s concerts drinking beer and singing at the top of their lungs as if they were attending an Oasis gig. The videos are funny — some provocative, others cringe-worthy. But it doesn’t matter: they travel thousands of miles, jumping from one WhatsApp to another.
“One of the keys to Ella Langley’s success is that she has given her music a rural feel,” explains Manolo Fernández, a leading country music expert and host of the program Radio with boots (broadcast on Spanish state radio RNE), over the phone. “She grew up in a small rural community (Hope Hull, Alabama), and from the very beginning, she embraced simple structures and a clean sound, a far cry from the artificial, overproduced tracks that have flooded Nashville — the mecca of country music — in recent years. Listeners are fed up with over-the-top recordings; they want something simpler.” Fernández contrasts the new star with so-called “bro country,” a commercial, heavily processed movement dominated by testosterone-fueled male artists whose lyrics are about getting drunk at parties that often end in fights.
Langley grew up in a Southern Baptist family and was home-schooled for much of her childhood. She listened to Hank Williams and Willie Nelson, but also to Mötley Crüe and Pearl Jam. Her grandfather was the first to support her, giving her his guitar when he died. As a teenager, she began performing at local gatherings until she wrote her first songs with her aunt. In 2019, at 20, she moved to Nashville determined to pursue music professionally. She caught Covid there and became one of many artists who used the pandemic to showcase their work through digital channels. TikTok became her springboard to a wider audience.
On her first album, Hungover, she included a duet with singer Riley Green, You Look Like You Love Me, which boosted her popularity. She had already been backed by Taylor Sheridan, the man who has revived the Western with series such as Yellowstone, Marshals, The Madison and Landman. Langley’s song Make Me Wanna Smoke was included in the first season of the latter in 2024. Since then, the singer’s romantic, country-tinged compositions have become a go-to choice for cowboy scenes in Landman, which stars Billy Bob Thornton.
In the video for Choosin’ Texas (which extends to seven minutes with a narrative when the song itself lasts 3:50), Langley shares the spotlight with Luke Grimes, one of the stars of Yellowstone and its spinoff Marshals — both Sheridan creations. The sound of Choosin’ Texas, which trots along thanks to Langley’s bright southern-tinged voice, uses instruments tied to 1970s country such as the pedal steel guitar and the mandolin, along with electric guitars. Miranda Lambert appears on the backing vocals; she co-wrote the song with Langley, which describes how a woman must let her boyfriend stay in Texas with an old flame while she heads to Tennessee. “It doesn’t take a crystal ball to see / A cowboy always finds a way to leave / Drinkin’ Jack all by myself / He’s choosin’ Texas, I can tell,” Langley sings. A beautiful, harmless, and innocent composition.
A wide-ranging feature published on September 13 in The New York Times talks about a paradigm shift: a provincial United States embracing country from the social margins. “When America was overwhelmingly white and more closely tied to its rural past, country and western motifs could be seen as conventional and confining. But today, with much of the population concentrated in cities and on the coasts, and as white non-Hispanic Americans inch closer to becoming a minority, the mores and manners of the country’s rural working class increasingly offer a source of authenticity. [...] Today, it’s country music that — for all its commercial success — represents the underdog,” the piece argues. Beyoncé helped break country clichés with her 2024 album Cowboy Carter, where she rightly reclaimed a certain African American pedigree in the genre.
So far, Choosin’ Texas has skirted the question of how it fits into Trump-era America. Young country singers have long stopped distancing themselves from Republican administrations, as shown by artists like Margo Price or Jesse Welles, who has been called the new Woody Guthrie. But Langley has avoided taking a stand. Her reluctance to give interviews is likely strategic. “In her lyrics, she tells stories that could happen to anyone, whether Republican or Democrat. She hasn’t taken a stand because she hasn’t needed to — yet. But given how dire things are in the United States, the moment may come when she has to say something. We’ll see...,” Fernández says.
What Langley could not avoid are comparisons to Taylor Swift, who began her career as a country-pop performer before shedding the pedal steel sound and rising to the summit of pop. “The new Taylor Swift,” The Telegraph bluntly headlined. “She reminds me more of Shania Twain,” Fernández counters.
According to Luminate, a music industry analytics firm, Choosin’ Texas had amassed 900 million streams in the United States and 1.2 billion worldwide through the end of August. In 2023, Langley had one million monthly listeners on Spotify; today she has 32 million. Despite these stratospheric figures, the craze has not reached Spain. Traditionally a difficult market for country music, Spain’s sales chart is currently topped by Karol G (Bby Wow) and Quevedo (La Graciosa). For now, however, Spain remains resistant to the Choosin’ Texas phenomenon.
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