NASHVILLE — Yes, it may have been a Tuesday afternoon in the lobby of an office building, but that didn’t mean that music executive Rusty Gaston was going to tamp down his enthusiasm.
“Everyone in this room, you are going to remember this day forever,” Gaston, chief executive of Sony Music Publishing Nashville, yelled to the 400-plus industry professionals gathered around a small stage. “Because you’re going to be able to say: ‘I was in the room with that group of songwriters when they changed the face of country music. And I got to celebrate that with them.’”
The crowd burst into applause as the four songwriters, perched on high-backed stools, smiled and reacted modestly. Such praise may have sounded hyperbolic, but it was not surprising — because they were all in attendance to celebrate “Choosin’ Texas,” the twangy ballad by 26-year-old country star Ella Langley that has shattered genre lines to turn into a crossover sensation.
Langley sat onstage alongside her co-writers: her best friend, Joybeth Taylor; her collaborator, Luke Dick; and her musical hero-turned-friend, Nashville superstar Miranda Lambert. Back when the four of them were working on songs for Langley’s new album and dreamed up the idea for “Choosin’ Texas” — an ode to lost love and two-stepping — they might have hoped the track would eventually be released as a single, and if they were lucky, climb the country charts.
But for the song to go No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Chart, then skyrocket out of the confines of country music and also top the all-genre Billboard Hot 100 songs chart for four weeks, breaking a record previously held by Taylor Swift at three weeks? And sit above hits from Harry Styles, Bruno Mars, Bad Bunny and the “KPop Demon Hunters” soundtrack? That never entered their minds as a possibility.
Now the group was gathered at BMI Nashville for a Music Row tradition known as the No. 1 party, where the industry toasts the songwriters behind the hits. Technically, on this chilly day in March, this was a double celebration for Langley’s previous No. 1, “Weren’t for the Wind,” as well as “Choosin’ Texas.” But the attention was largely focused on the latter, which has been streamed more than 525 million times worldwide, in addition to becoming a country (and pop) radio hit and going viral on TikTok. It’s officially a mainstream smash — a rare feat from a modern country star, unless your name is Morgan Wallen or Luke Combs.
“I mean, we loved the song when we wrote it,” Langley told reporters at a news conference before the party. “But did we think it could do something like this? I don’t know how you could predict that.”
“My favorite thing about it is it’s a country song and it was universal,” Lambert said, adding that it led to “a platform for a great country song and true country songwriters to have this moment that doesn’t happen that often.”
The story behind the song
So what is it about “Choosin’ Texas”?
Industry experts point to a perfect storm: An ideal pairing of song and young artist whose career was already blowing up. Lyrics with a compelling story. Irresistible production that sounds enough like classic country to please the genre’s traditional listeners, combined with an earworm melody that draws in everyone else. A popular TikTok dance. Langley’s smooth inflection when she croons the word “Abilene,” which delighted fans on social media. (At the news conference, Langley credited her Alabama drawl for that one: “I think the way I say my words is a little weird sometimes.”)
“I haven’t seen anything like it,” Russ Penuell, Billboard’s chart analyst for country, Christian and gospel music, told The Washington Post. Some songs break out on the radio, some start racking up streams early on, and some take off on social media — this one did all three. He added, “Everything seemed to line up at the same time. … It just moved really, really fast.”
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The idea for “Choosin’ Texas” started with, of all things, a story about a kangaroo. As Langley has explained, she was ecstatic in late 2024 to book a songwriting session with Lambert, whose music she idolized growing up. During the co-write, Lambert told an anecdote about how she once got pulled over while she was casually driving with her pet kangaroo (really) in the passenger seat. Lambert, a Texas native, was driving a car with the state’s license plates, and Langley joked that the police officer probably thought, “She’s from Texas, I can tell.”
For some reason, the phrase sparked something for the group: What if “she’s from Texas, I can tell” actually referred to a song’s narrator realizing that her boyfriend was thinking about another woman, one from the Lone Star state? The song poured out in less than an hour, complete with a mournful chorus: “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 … Drinkin’ Jack all by myself, he’s choosin’ Texas, I can tell.”
By the time the song — produced by Langley, Lambert and Ben West — was released this past October, Langley was already on a hot streak. She left Auburn University before graduation to move to Nashville to chase the music dream, and after years of performing at bars and festivals, she landed a record deal with Columbia Records and Sony Music Nashville in 2023. Her debut major-label single, the flirty Riley Green duet “You Look Like You Love Me,” went multiplatinum, followed by the hit “Weren’t for the Wind.”
Female artists have a difficult enough time getting spots on country radio — only about 10 percent of songs are by women — but something unusual happened when “Choosin’ Texas” started circulating online. Typically, label promotion directors have to lobby radio stations to play an artist’s new single. But Triple Tigers Records, the independent Nashville label contracted to promote the song to radio, started hearing from eager programmers asking how soon they could add it to their playlists.
Raffaella Braun, vice president of national promotion for Triple Tigers, had heard only clips of the song on social media when she started receiving these messages. “They said, ‘We want to be in on this record.’ … And that doesn’t happen very often,” she said. “So we started listening to it, and everybody was like, ‘Oh my God, this is so good!’ It’s just catchy and it’s fun.”
Several months later, in February, the song became the first song by a woman in Billboard history to lead the Country Airplay, Hot Country Songs and Hot 100 charts simultaneously. (The latter two measure airplay, sales and streaming.) A few weeks later, “Choosin’ Texas” dropped and then rose again to No. 1 on the Hot 100, marking another milestone: That same week, Megan Moroney’s new album topped the Billboard Top 200 albums chart, which was the first time two female country singers had ever simultaneously led Billboard’s two prestigious charts, an achievement that the outlet deemed “downright unprecedented.”
Last week, “Choosin’ Texas” spent its fourth week atop the Billboard Hot 100 and continues to grow. Pop radio, not wanting to be left behind, has started spinning the track, and it recently cracked the top 30 on pop airplay. Langley also just released the official music video, with a juicy storyline starring “Yellowstone” actor Luke Grimes, along with Ava Phillippe, racking up 2.5 million views in about a day.
The meaning of a ‘megahit’
Frank Edwards, program director of K-99 Country (99.1 FM) in Corpus Christi, Texas, has heard quite a few country songs about his home state. But this one stood out immediately. He liked the strong hook that told a story, in addition to the steel guitar.
Edwards is not surprised the song had a strong response from listeners, especially in Texas, but he has been marveling at the range of the audience: The other day, his elementary school-age daughter incorporated the line “She’s from Texas, I can tell” into an art project, around the same time he saw a man with a giant pickup truck that boasted a “Choosin’ Texas” bumper sticker.
“It’s not just kids. I mean, it’s everybody. Truly, everybody connected with that song,” he said. Langley, who will release her sophomore album, “Dandelion,” on April 10, just announced a headlining arena tour, including a date in Corpus Christi. Edwards said the last time he can remember similar hype around a show was when George Strait and Taylor Swift came to town.
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Everyone involved in the song emphasized that ultimately, the success shows the universality of music. At the No. 1 party, songwriter Luke Dick said he was recently in San Francisco’s Chinatown and saw a man at a dumpling restaurant wearing a “Choosin’ Texas” hat. Listeners on TikTok confess they have never had a country song stuck in their head like this before.
During the news conference, a reporter asked Langley if the meaning of the track has changed for her since it became “such a huge megahit.” She responded that although she writes lyrics as a way to process her own life, sometimes a song evolves for others in ways that you could never predict.
“We’re just going in there and just having fun with the people we love making music with, and you don’t realize that could be a song that changes your life forever,” Langley said. “And so to me, this song just keeps reinforcing that — that every song matters.”
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