Ella Langley's Choosin' Texas becomes longest-running number one in US chart history

Langley's song was written at a writing retreat in 2024, with assistance from country star Miranda Lambert.

Unexpectedly, it started with a discussion about a pet kangaroo Lambert had once owned.

"She told me the story about how she got pulled over [by the police] with a kangaroo in the passenger seat and a dog in the back," Langley explained.

The officer was so surprised that she didn't issue a ticket.

Langley responded to Lambert, saying the cop must have known she was from Texas, given the chaos unfolding in the car.

That prompted the lyric, "She's from Texas, I can tell."

Over the next 30 minutes, the writers (who also included Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor) cooked up a story about a woman in Tennessee, who realises her partner's heart still belongs to Texas... and to another girl.

First previewed on stage in February 2025, Langley said she instantly knew it would become the first single from her sophomore album, Dandelion.

"We loved that song, but I don't think I could ever have imagined what's happening with it right now," the singer told Billboard magazine.

"Every day I wake up and it's doing something that I didn't even know was a goal I could have had. It's crazy, it's nuts."

Its success helped the 27-year-old, who is actually from Alabama, sweep the Academy of Country Music Awards in May.

She won in all seven categories in which she was nominated, including female artist of the year, artist songwriter of the year, and both single and song of the year, for Choosin' Texas.

It is now one of only two songs to surpass 20 weeks at number one on the US charts - with the other being Mariah Carey's perennial Christmas smash All I Want for Christmas Is You.

But the records for long-running hits have been tumbling ever since streaming became a mainstream phenomenon.

For 23 years, Carey's own One Sweet Day, a duet with Boyz II Men, held the title, notching up 16 weeks at number one.

Daddy Yankee and Luis Fonsi's Despacito remix, featuring Justin Bieber, tied the record in 2017; then Lil Nas X's Old Town Road surpassed it the following year, eventually spending 19 weeks at the top.

All I Want for Christmas Is You eventually overtook that, thanks to its habit of returning to the charts every December.

But critics say that streaming services are increasingly encouraging listeners to play the same playlists of familiar songs over and over again, creating a bottleneck that makes it harder for new music to break through.

In 2022, a report by the UK's Competition and Markets Authority, external found that more than 60% of streams were of music recorded by only the top 0.4% of artists.