Ella Langley – Weren’t for the Wind

Subjunctive moods…

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Nortey Dowuona: Langley’s voice is supple and yet blank, easily able to press Johnny Clawson and common collaborator Joybeth Taylor‘s lyrics onto your eardrums. The first verse acts as apologia for her unwillingness to stick to any of her partners, the second her desire to pack up and flee. On the post-chorus she describes her love of this flight: “Blowin, carryin’ me to the wide open, white lines rollin’ and the tires smokin’, it wouldn’t be the rearview I’m lookin in.” But both verse and the pre chorus are vague, flowery, unable to dig into why. Sometimes there is no why, but the song itself is so vague and nonspecific that one cannot pull it apart to find any sort of identity. By contrast, on “Girl You’re Taking Home,” Langley and Taylor directly detail the relationships her partner chooses to nurture and support, often without prompting, reminder or plea, while theirs is taken for granted and assumed to be consistently on his terms. It doesn’t feel identikit but directly tailored to Langley’s voice. And it comes right before “Weren’t for the Wind” on the album as well! One wonders why this song is even a single.
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Alfred Soto: Everything’s in place — the pedal steel guitar, Ella Langley’s well-modulated poignancy, the length — yet why doesn’t “Weren’t for the Wind” cut? Its devotion to courtesy perhaps.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Needs to be either more wistful or more ballsy, or really just more.
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Claire Davidson: “Weren’t for the Wind” has the wistful atmosphere to match its lyrical conceit, its instrumental comprised of mournful pedal steel and sandy percussion that easily evokes a lonesome Western night. Beyond such set dressing, though, the details are all wrong. A song lamenting its narrator’s wanderlust shouldn’t move at such a breathless pace, and Ella Langley’s downbeat, matter-of-fact delivery lacks the romanticism needed to make her fate as a lovelorn nomad sound convincing. The lyrics aren’t noteworthy, either—between the lack of introspection and the clunky turns of phrase (“find me you”), the song is just as fleeting as Langley’s many affairs.
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Andrew Karpan: Like those old, golden Kacey records, it’s only country if you think about it, with Langley’s elegantly frozen twang only hiding somewhere in the mix. More good stuff for the Cowboy Vibes playlist for well-dressed hipsters pregaming the latest landing of the Cowboy Carter tour, for as long as that can abide.
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Mark Sinker: You guys know I don’t have to listen to music, right?
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Scott Mildenhall: What is happening with this Ella Langley microclimate? Do onlookers ever question how the wind is so fixed to her talent? How does it make a plane fly once she’s inside it? Could it be that planes don’t need wind? This might be splitting hairs, but when you invoke the elements, you have to be ready for questions. And if it weren’t for the wind, there would be far less to talk about.
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