Ella Langley – Choosin’ Texas

I’m in El Paso, watching you kiss her, oh-oh-oh…

[Video]
[7.08]

Alfred Soto: We’re getting to this fall ’25 stunner late, which is fine if its demotic cadences, guitar hook worthy of ’80s Rosanne Cash, and easy wordplay seduce more listeners.
[9]

Al Varela: An instant classic. Ella Langley plays the fool as she sings about a guy she’s been flirting with and trying to get to move to Tennessee with her, helplessly watching as he’s more charmed by a girl from Texas. This is a well-worn tradition in country music, but “Choosin’ Texas” puts such a unique yet nostalgic spin on it that you can’t help but be charmed by the twang of the guitars and wails of the steel pedal. The bemused comedy, a staple of Langley’s songwriting, makes her one of the brightest stars in country music today. And I love the way she says “Come on, baby” at the end of the song.
[9]

Claire Davidson: Well, well, well: it only took eight years, but it seems like the lingering influence of Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour in the indie sphere has finally caught up to Music Row’s biggest power players. Naturally, I have a lot of affection for Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas,” which may lack the reverb-coated atmospherics of its predecessor but clearly shows its influence in its dreamy sensibility. Just listen to the sun-bleached gauze of its central guitar lick, or the touches of pedal steel in the verses that feel wrought with stardust. What keeps me from loving this track, as with “Weren’t for the Wind” before it, is how strange a fit Langley’s vocal timbre is, too dour and syrupy to convey the delicate resignation in the lyrics. It’s rare for an otherwise promising track to be so directly hampered by its vocalist. The song has issues beyond this, too—namely, the lyrical dichotomy between Tennessee and Texas, which is intended to symbolize a choice Langley’s partner makes between lovers but is clumsy: if he shared his fondest memories of country music with her, then why is his love of “Amarillo by Morning” framed as an adversarial red flag?
[6]

Edward Okulicz: This starts out so beautifully, with guitars that don’t just weep but shimmer as if glazed with honey and teardrops. But at the end, “Choosin’ Texas” smells a bit less like heartache and more like new car smell. The melody is similar to at least one Miranda Lambert song (maybe the verses of “Tequila Does”?), and in the time it took me to try to work out the second, I realised that the lyrics are a bit silly, as if they took a really great concept and couldn’t stretch it to a full song-length. But this is so shiny and expertly put together that it’s impossible to hate.
[7]

Ian Mathers: The melody is nice enough, and by the extremely low bar of the type of pop country that gets big enough to hit the Jukebox, this at least just sounds like country. But the lyrics are…. one hates to say “dumb,” so let’s go with ill-considered and/or faintly baffling. Those guitars sure are pretty, though.
[6]

Katherine St. Asaph: “Is she singing “jack off by myself?”
[3]

Wayne Weizhen Zhang: Langley establishes an entire cinematic universe within two lines: “Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee/I should have known better than to take him back to Abilene.” Yes, the Miranda lineage here is clear and strong, but Langley’s precise delivery nails the conceit about place and lost love.
[7]

Taylor Alatorre: The Texas-Tennessee axis is a geographic restatement of a divide that’s haunted country music since the dawn of Sun Records: honky tonks vs. recording booths, outlaw grit vs. Music Row polish, regional loyalty vs. crossover ambition, and most concretely, fiddle and steel vs. “rock n’ roll guitars.” That last dichotomy is now the least relevant one of all, owing not just to what Garth (and Tritt, and Aldean…) hath wrought, but also to rock’s concurrent fading from the mainstream. Play almost any classic rock song with a dB level lower than Slayer to the average zoomer and be prepared to hear it described as “country music.” This doesn’t mean the old dividing lines have disappeared, though, any more than the passing of the 19th century means that corsets and crinoline ever disappeared; there’s always gonna be period dramas. Ella Langley uses the neotraditional sound as a stage backdrop in a way that feels less lived-in than when Zach Top does it, but she plays as no less sincere in her desire to lasso an unobtainable dream. George Strait and Jerry Reed are the respective signposts marking the western and eastern ends of her I-40 journey, and it doubles as a show of her lovelornness that she instinctively reaches toward the former. Langley doesn’t hate “Texas” for stealing her man away from her, and she gleans a bittersweet pleasure from her immediate familiarity with the source of his sudden two-stepping. If an offense has been committed, it’s one that remains “in the family,” so to speak–in choosing Texas, her ex has elected to stay within the good graces of country music Christendom, one whose schisms are rendered obsolete in the face of a strange and hostile outside world. In the end, she must admit that he may have made the right choice, even it isn’t the right one for her. It’s that sort of resigned fatalism, more than any fiddle or Dobro, that is country music’s true national language.
[8]

Julian Axelrod: Rewriting “Neon Moon” for a post-Casa Amor Love Island recoupling is genius on both a songcraft and licensing level. Loser country is so back.
[8]

Andrew Karpan: I’ve been to Texas. Well, I haven’t “been to Texas” been to Texas, but I’ve been to Austin, so I know that endless concrete under the sun thing, that neon-colored cowboy hat thing, and it sucks and all the roads go on forever and they go nowhere, and it always feels pleasant, just suspiciously so. God knows Ella Langley, her voice capable of hitting like a sock full of quarters, could have hit harder instead of just hard enough for mass communication, which is really not hard at all.
[5]

Jel Bugle: Ella has a nice voice, and I’m sure she’ll sell some records and write some more songs, drink some Jack, have her heart broken, ever was it thus. A sort of melancholy story of every country singer, forever.  
[7]

Nortey Dowuona: Ella Langley and my brother are the same age. In both of them I see the same weary, wry nature, the same thoughtful contemplation, the same earnest kindness left to float in the wind with whomever they meet. Langley also views the world in a less restrictive and frustrated way than her new collaborator Miranda Lambert. There’s a smile in her tone as she regards her now former paramour making for his new paramour — the resigned but gentle respect for them both, accepting that tonight she’ll have to go home without him — but it’s still a deeply frustrating and painful moment. Her voice is golden, lush and well mannered and not misused this time. Ben West takes the producer’s chair alongside Ella, cheering her up with a cranberry juice instead — much like my brother, who works at a bar. Bless her, and bless him too. Let us all find our Texas.
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