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Ella Langley was nearly speechless over her latest historic milestone.
Langley, 27, set a new record with her massive hit single “Choosin’ Texas,” which has officially spent 23 weeks at No. 1. The Alabama-born country star’s run has surpassed Mariah Carey’s iconic Christmas anthem, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” Langley tried to find the words to express her feelings as her dog barked in the background of a video she shared on Instagram:
“I’m genuinely trying to find the words to help explain what’s going on in my brain today. …Thank you so much. Thank you for loving this song, for listening to it. I feel like I just don’t even know what to say at this point. ...It’s changing my life. It’s changing lives of the writers of this song. It’s changing lives of my family, and it is truly growing an atmosphere for something I’m going to be able to do the rest of my life. And I just — today it doesn’t feel like a real thing. It feels fake, and somebody’s going to come in and be like, ‘ha ha, we’re kidding the whole time! We’re just kidding!’ But I’m going to go out and celebrate tonight and I’m really excited to just experience a moment like this in my life.”
Langley wrote “Choosin’ Texas” with Miranda Lambert, Joybeth Taylor and Luke Dick. It was one of 18 tracks to appear on her 18-track sophomore studio record, Dandelion, which also included “Be Her,” “Loving Life Again,” “Butterfly Season” with Lambert, and more. Langley, the most-nominated artist at the upcoming 60th CMA Awards, delivered a cinematic music video to bring the song to life earlier this year.
“We were just having a writer’s retreat, and she [Lambert] was telling me this story about how she had a kangaroo in her passenger seat, and she got pulled over, and the cop was like, ‘oh, you have Texas plates.’ And I went, ‘well, she’s from Texas, I can tell,’” Langley said of the story behind the song on the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Awards red carpet. “And literally just from that phrase, the ‘she’s from Texas, I can tell by the way,’ kind of just fell out, and I think we all latched onto that story of, ‘oh, he picked the other girl.’ You know? He picked someone else. I think everyone’s had a crush, and at some point that crush was more into somebody else at one point. If not, then lucky you or you’re lying.”