Ella Langley’s ‘Choosin’ Texas’ Dominates Hot 100 for 24 Weeks, Sparking Fan Debate

If you’re one of the many people who’ve been expressing their shock the past week or two about Ella Langley ’s “Choosin’ Texas” becoming the longest-reigning Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 of all time, that’s basically understandable.

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After all, If you were to try to custom-design a song to become the most indomitable No. 1 hit in Hot 100 history, going just by the history of both American popular music and of the Billboard charts, it probably wouldn’t look or sound like “Choosin’ Texas” by Ella Langley. It would be a bigger-feeling song by a bigger-name superstar artist (or two), it would have all sorts of narrative hooks built into its lyrics, its sound and its backstory, and it would come with an entire promo plan behind it designed to not just make it initially ubiquitous, but continually unignorable. It would seem historic long before it actually became historic.

That’s not “Choosin’ Texas.” It’s not totally not “Choosin’ Texas,” of course — the song is an obvious-sounding hit by a quickly rising star with a number of fascinatingly mid-2020s elements to discuss about it and a handful of pretty big looks culturally. But did it seem historic right off the bat the way that Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men’s megastar teamup and 16-week No. 1 “One Sweet Day” did? Or even a tiny bit after the bat, like Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber’s map-expanding 16-week No. 1 “Despacito” did, or Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ culture-shifting 19-week No. 1 “Old Town Road” did? Not particularly.

In fact, at numerous points along its chart journey to 24 weeks at No. 1 (as of this week’s Oct. 3-dated chart), “Texas” looked like its momentum was about to run aground. When it fell from its new Hot 100 peak of No. 11 down to No. 27 last December, buried by the annual avalanche of holiday titles, it looked like it might have missed its chance even to just hit the top 10. When it rebounded after the holiday rush and reached No. 1 on Feb. 14, it looked to be in a dead heat with Olivia Dean’s similarly long-climbing “Man I Need” — and if it lost out that week, it could’ve gotten boxed out by an imminent Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance and new Taylor Swift video and physical single, which did propel both artists to No. 1 in the weeks to follow. Then, having already spent 10 combined weeks at No. 1, “Texas” was absent from the top spot from late May all the way through June — replaced by new singles from three of the biggest pop stars in the world, Drake, Ariana Grande and (again) Swift.

Each time, it looked like the end of the “Choosin’ Texas” Hot 100 story — and a logical, not particularly ill-fitting end for a song that could’ve faded away at any of these points and still been looked at as both a major breakthrough hit for Langley and one of the biggest country songs of the past year. And each time, it came back even stronger — without many obvious pushes from Langley, her team or the larger culture — to the point where it now stands alone, not only in her catalogue and among country crossover hits, but among all 68 years’ worth of Hot 100 history.

So how did this happen? And why has it inspired not just such surprise, but fury among those just learning about “Choosin’ Texas” and its chart dominance these past couple weeks?

How the Charts Have Evolved in the Last Decade — Particularly at the Top

The most important thing to understand about “Texas” and its 24-week run at No. 1 is that had it come out two decades earlier — really even one decade earlier — not only would it have no chance of spending that long at No. 1, it likely wouldn’t have sniffed the top spot at all. That’s not about how the song would have made for a poorer fit in the country landscape of 2005 or 2015 — in truth, the song’s casual timelessness is one of its most endearing and immediately apparent qualities. It’s just about how much the Hot 100, and country’s place within it, has changed over those decades.

First of all, between the time Lonestar’s “Amazed” topped the Hot 100 in 2000 and Morgan Wallen scored his first No. 1 with “Last Night” in 2023, only two country songs (defined as songs eligible for Billboard ’s Hot Country Songs chart) bested the listing — both by Swift, and both with at least one foot already clearly in the pop world. For the overwhelming majority of the 21st century, the Hot 100’s No. 1 spot has been demonstrably off limits for country artists. But with the genre finding its foothold in the streaming age of the 2020s, generating massive stars like Wallen and Zach Bryan, and gradually even creeping into top 40 radio — particularly as hip-hop, easily the most dominant genre of streaming’s first decade, has seen its supremacy erode — country’s chart ceiling has risen dramatically. Now, a staggering 11 of the 32 songs in Billboard history to top both the Hot 100 and Country Songs have done so since 2023, and earlier this year, the chart’s entire top five was stocked with country songs for the first time ever .

But the door suddenly being wide open to country atop the Hot 100 is only one of the two biggest chart transformations to consider when discussing the “Choosin’ Texas” run, and arguably the smaller of the two. The other is that turnover on the chart has slowed massively, particularly in its top tier. With the biggest radio stations both shrinking their playlists and keeping them increasingly static — and the majority of lean-back listening on streaming shifting from curated editorial playlists to algorithmic personalized listening and autoplay — songs last as hits longer than they ever have before , while artists, labels and general tastemakers have less power than ever to redirect public listening habits from one single to the next. (Tellingly, even in the midst of her “Choosin’ Texas” run, Langley has also scored two massive follow-up hits on the chart — ”Be Her,” which reached No. 2, and the Wallen duet “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” a No. 4 hit — both of which rose and fell on the chart without disrupting her “Choosin’ Texas” run at all.)

As a result, the week that “Texas” set the Hot 100 record with its 23rd week on top, it was one of eight songs in the top 10 that had already spent double-digit weeks in the region — with only Morgan Wallen’s “Been By Now” (eight weeks on the chart, all in the top 10) and Karol G, Judeline and rusowsky’s “BbY WOW” (six weeks on the chart, two in the top 10) resembling any degree of new blood. With pop music culturally fractured, new hits having to compete more and more not just with each other but with catalog hits from the recent (and not-so-recent) past, and even a once-dynamic viral needle-mover like TikTok finding its audience more splintered than ever, breakout hits have been few and far between in the past year. Consequently, the Hot 100’s top tier is increasingly stocked by brand-new debuts from established big-name artists, and the same hits that have dominated for months already.

This long-time trending of the chart towards a slower pace and longer-running hits can be seen in the number of songs that have laid claim in the past 10 years to the same record that “Choosin’ Texas” just broke. For more than 21 years, starting in early 1996, the record for most weeks spent at No. 1 belonged to one song and one song only: “One Sweet Day,” which reigned for 16 weeks, a Hot 100 record that no other song even came within a week of. Then, in September 2017, it was tied at 16 weeks by “Despacito.” Both songs were then zoomed past two years later, when “Old Town Road” spent 19 weeks at No. 1 in 2019. Five years after that, Shaboozey matched that by spending 19 weeks at No. 1 with his 2024 smash “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” And then from last December to this January, Carey leapfrogged all of them with another four weeks on top for her now-annual holiday No. 1 “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” giving her 22 weeks total. With the addition of Langley’s run, a mark that held untouched in the record books for 21 years has now been tied or passed five times in the past decade.

Why So Many Listeners Have Been Choosin’ “Texas”

This all speaks to why the Hot 100 was primed for a song like Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” to take it over like never before in chart history. But why was it “Choosin’ Texas” specifically that became the song to rise to the opportunity? That question’s been the one countless casual chart-watchers have been asking the past week — sometimes loudly and angrily — and it’s a little more complicated to answer.

“Texas” definitely has many of the qualities of a big, enduring country hit. It has a memorable title, an unforgettable chorus, a smart (and time – tested ) conceit, a melody that goes down incredibly smoothly, production that calls back to past eras without feeling explicitly retro, and lyrics that express familiar sentiments in a new and clever way, convincingly and relatably delivered by Langley herself. Arriving a year after the No. 30-peaking “You Look Like You Love Me” first established Ella Langley as a Hot 100-level hitmaker — with Langley scoring several additional similarly sized hits in the intervening months, including as a guest on songs by rapper BigXthaPlug and her “Love Me” duet partner Riley Green — the initial chart success of the sublime “Texas” was not surprising in the slightest.

Then it kept growing. As the song outlasted the holiday crunch and breached the Hot 100’s top 10 in January — setting itself apart from Langley’s prior hits to that point — it was clear something extra was going on. Part of that was the song’s pop appeal, with a sweet sound and breezy sway that called back to an early-’80s era when, thanks to crossover hitmakers like Kenny Rogers, Eddie Rabbitt and Dolly Parton (and the blockbuster Urban Cowboy soundtrack), the distance between pop and country was shorter than ever before. Part of it was also that the song’s gently melancholic vibe and midtempo energy also make it a natural fit for the streaming era in general, allowing it to slot naturally on playlists between, say, The Marias’ alt-pop daydream “No One Noticed” and Kehlani’s R&B breakup ballad “Folded,” without particularly standing out for its twanginess.

But part of it was also narrative-based momentum. As “Choosin’ Texas” made more and more fans’ notice, so did viral rumors of it being inspired by a real-life love triangle between Langley, Green and fellow country chart-topper Megan Moroney. Internet sleuths looked for clues tying the three and the song together and shared them in videos across TikTok and other social platforms, accelerating the heat and movement “Texas” was already building. None of the hitmakers involved ever confirmed any kind of romantic relationship, let alone a breakup, let alone one inspiring the song in question — and, it should be said, none of the three is even from Texas — but none of them denied it either, allowing fans to continue to chatter away, likely boosting the exposure and popularity of all three artists in the process.

This all — along with some last-minute pleading from Langley herself for fans to help “make country music history” — led to “Texas” taking its first bow at No. 1 on the Hot 100 in February. Given the song’s stability across formats, with a solid base in both country radio (ultimately spending four weeks atop Billboard ’s Country Airplay chart) and across DSPs like Spotify and Apple Music (regularly topping the daily U.S. streaming charts on both), it seemed likely to stick around near the top of the chart for some time to come. But even as the song began racking up weeks at No. 1, its reign was regularly interrupted — first by Bad Bunny (“DtMF”) and Taylor Swif

_Originally reported by [Billboard](https://www.billboard.com/music/chart-beat/ella-langley-choosin-texas-hot-100-record-backlash-1236349866/)._