Ella Langley’s hit song Choosin’ Texas has made Billboard 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 Billboard 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”.
“I think this has been the biggest moment for me, where I’ve seen where fans can change your career. 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 Billboard 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.
“Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee / I shoulda known better than to take him back to Abilene / I put him right back into her arms / I wasn’t a match for that kind of spark,” Langley sings in the opening verse.
“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.”
Other country references in the song include “Smoky Mountain rain,” “Memphis blues,” and Tennessee’s famous Jack Daniel’s whiskey.
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.
“Everything about the song throws back to a simpler time in country music that people are really craving,” Banks told the Guardian in July, adding: “All of these writers have been working in the Nashville market for years … So even though this is a song that they said they spat out in 30 minutes or whatever, it was coming through their instincts that have been developed for a long time about what is hooky and what pulls people in.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
