WIth the demise of the monoculture it’s hard to have a bonafide hit, but try telling that to Ella Langley. Her 2025 single Choosin’ Texas has just broken the record for the most weeks spent at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 – 23 and counting – beating the previous mark set by Mariah Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You.
Of course, there will still be those who protest that they've never heard of either Langley or her omnipresent song, but her achievements are staggering. As well as breaking the Hot 100 record, she recently became the first country artist to top the UK singles chart for more than 20 years, and Choosin’ Texas’s streaming numbers and TikTok views run into the billions.
Langley co-wrote the song with Luke Dick, Miranda Lambert and Joybeth Taylor, and speaking to Billboard, she said that she knew immediately that it was going to be included on Dandelion, her second studio album.
“When we wrote it, I knew it was going on the record,” she recalls. “I honestly knew it was gonna be the lead single.”
Despite her confidence in Choosin’ Texas, though, Langley admits that its massive success is beyond anything she could have dreamed of.
“We love that song, but I don’t think I could have ever imagined what’s happening with it right now. Every day I wake up and it’s doing something that I didn’t even know was a goal that I could have had. And it’s just, it’s nuts. It’s crazy to see the ownership that the fans have taken over it, and the different demographics of people listening to the song is so cool. Just nuts to see everything happen.”
Choosin’ Texas was written on a writers’ retreat, and was born after Miranda Lambert had been telling Langley a story about once owning a pet kangaroo.
“She was telling me this story about how she got pulled over once. She had the kangaroo in the passenger seat, dog in the back, and she said she got pulled over and the kangaroo ended up getting her out of a ticket, but she’s like, ‘Of course, I had Texas plates on too.’ And I went, ‘Well, she’s from Texas. I can tell.’”
Bingo: “Just from that phrase, it kinda all hit us and the melody fell right out of me,” says Langley. “I went: ‘She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way he’s two-stepping round the room.’ Just like that. And Miranda was like, ‘Like the one he went with, the girl he went with.’ And 45 minutes later we had that song written.”
45 minutes well spent, we’d say, though there’s more to Choosin’ Texas’s success than the lyrics and melody. The introduction to the song features a distinctive twangy electric guitar lick, and that was played by renowned Nashville session ace Tom ‘Uncle Larry’ Bukovac.
Earlier this year, Bukovac discussed his contribution with the song’s engineer, Dave Clauss. “Ella came in and she was saying, ‘I want this vibe to be like an '80s country thing,’ he explained.
Addressing Clauss, Bukovac continues: “We all gathered in the control room and Charlie Worsham was there [acoustic guitar player on Choosin’ Texas] and we got a couple of acoustics and I just started coming up with that lick, and I thought it'd be cool to record it direct like the guys used to do in the '80s. So I said to you, ‘Can we just get a cool direct sound like a clean kind of Strat vibe?’ And I remember, I had my old Jeff Senn Strat and I ran the guitar into the pedalboard into the direct rig.”
“I think it went straight into the desk, which is an API, and then pretty slamming on the 1176 [compressor],” adds Clauss. “It's amazing – now it's almost like this iconic lick, direct.”
Not that this came as a huge surprise to Bukovac: “I remember saying on the session when we recorded it – and I never say this – I remember saying, ‘this song is going to be a fucking smash,’ and then when we got together months later to do another session, the first thing Ella said to me was like, ‘You called it. You knew it was going to be a hit.’”
Turning to the isolated guitar parts, Clauss reveals that the main lick is actually two tracks – a lead and a harmonised double – and that Bukovac added a third rhythm part underneath. There are also a lot of effects: “I was probably my EarthQuaker Dispatch Master and the Line 6 – I use a lot of Line 6 M9 digital reverb,” says Bukovac. Clauss added plenty of plugin “sauce” on top of that, too.
Listen to Choosin’ Texas carefully and you’ll notice the subtle guitar parts that fill the gaps between Langley’s vocals, which were recorded as the band played. This meant that Bukovac was able to make them respond perfectly to each line of the song, and helps to give it a ‘live’ feel.
Choosin’ Texas has definitely ‘connected’, and its cross-generational appeal is a rarity in this day and age. It’s worth saying, though, that Langley’s time in the Billboard record books could be short-lived: with the festive season looming charge and Mariah Carey going back out on tour to celebrate, surely it’s only a matter of time before her evergreen Christmas hit reaches the top spot once again…
