By Jesse Raub
When Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” broke the record for the longest-running Number One song in Billboard Hot 100 history, a lot of people just flat out had never heard the song before. The song it dethroned—Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You”—is a perennial holiday season titan, ubiquitous in every store and strewn throughout TV commercials year after year. Dethroning Carey’s ode to the holiday album cash grab felt like an impossibility for something that seemingly hadn’t cracked the mainstream—so much so that Rolling Stone writer Marissa Moss accused naysayers of lying about not having heard the song for urban clout.
Thankfully, the Garbage Day newsletter tackled why this phenomenon wasn’t impossible: the Nashville engine is really good at manipulating radio play in January, right after people want to rid their lives of Carey’s Christmas-themed, physics-defying high notes, and most people’s music consumption is highly shunted into individual consumption via streaming. It’s something I’ve written about before. For most people, music consumption has always been embracing something that has been handed to you. In the 90s, that meant hearing a song on the radio and buying a CD. In 2026, that means being fed a song through your algorithm and adding it to your library. It also doesn’t hurt that country music is finally catching up on streaming vs. traditional radio play.
The algorithm works in unique ways, though. Many country music fans likely had “Choosin’ Texas” pumped into an auto-generated playlist while driving or running on the treadmill. Most other folks likely experienced the song clipped as a soundbite for Instagram Reels or TikTok. Social media soundtracking is a sort of symbiotic relationship: cut a fun video of you lip-syncing to a song (or acting out the lyrics in an offbeat way), and you’ll be boosting that song to anyone who gets front-facing camera videos in their feed. Pick a popular song that’s gaining steam, and the algorithm will then feed your video to anyone who has reacted to that song before.
It’s not that urban writer types posting on Bluesky are looking for ways to other country music fans, it’s that urban writer types are more likely to eschew new music discovery mechanisms in favor of a music library they’ve carefully been curating on their hard drive since they got their first iMac in 2004 and started ripping CDs into iTunes (it is me: I am Urban Writer Type, and I have indeed been consistently updating the same digital music library for 22 years). I don’t let Apple Music create new playlists for me, but even if I did, it would be too busy trying to spoon-feed me the new Chat Pile album (which exactly sounds like music I should like).
It doesn’t help that country music has historically been denigrated by many self-identified sophisticates. But while there are class divides around the signifiers embedded in the country music of yore, modern country is just a part of mainstream suburban America. That is to say, it’s hard to claim that country music is a picked-on underdog when the article you’re writing is about a country song being the most popular song of all time (by the Billboard Hot 100 metrics). But it’s also hard to claim country music is unfairly denigrated when the genre has evolved so far beyond its roots. Musically, modern country has shifted from its early incarnation as a mishmash of folk music and the blues into a variety of rock, pop, or hip-hop that’s country-themed more than anything. But there’s nothing country music fans love more than to try to define what is and what is not country music. Something as simple as a backbeat was considered heresy by some country audiences through the 1960s, and country rock albums like The Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo, once unappealing to country fans for their modernity, now sound like a traditionalist take on the form.
In that regard, “Choosin’ Texas” has more in common with Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” than a Hank Williams song. Both songs clip along at a plucky mid-tempo with a disco-lite beat with a rhythmic bass line, giving ample space for a standout female vocal performance and an undeniably catchy hook. The production is slick, the snare is punchy and high in the mix, and the guitar is bright and clean, leading with a distinctive melody that sticks in your head. Layer in the backing vocals on the chorus and bake in a catch lyric, and you’ve got a winning formula.
Where “Choosin’ Texas” excels in modern music is how well it’s constructed to be clipped for social media soundbites—each verse is only four lines, and Langley rushes the last one in each stanza to hit the twice-as-long chorus with aplomb. When the chorus does hit, it starts with Langley belting, “She’s from Texas, I can tell by the way,” setting up the perfect soundtrack for any Texas-based front-facing camera influencer to frame themselves. Search the song on Instagram Reels, and you’ll see a parade of outfit videos featuring big hats, hair and makeup tutorials designed to capture Langley’s look for yourself, and all manner of videos parodying the idea of the first two (including a guy in full Leatherface gear captioned “he’s also from Texas”).
Social media promotion only goes so far, though. Billboard doesn’t clock TikTok soundbites, so in order to truly crack the charts, that clip has to translate into radio plays and streams. “Choosin’ Texas” proved catchy enough to do just that. But if the song doesn’t seem as ubiquitous as, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso,” there’s a reason: the song is popular enough that it doesn’t need outside marketing. “Espresso” launched with a social media campaign designed to build organic buzz in 2024 that transitioned into an in-person marketing tie-in at Blank Street Coffee before launching a partnership with Dunkin' Donuts in 2025. The song felt everywhere because it had a year-long marketing campaign pushing it into every avenue possible to boost its relevance. “Choosin’ Texas” doesn’t need a marketing boost yet—it’s still riding the highs of organic growth. Even then, “Choosin’ Texas” only has 160,000 or so Instagram Reels clipping it, while various forms of “Espresso” have been clipped nearly 3 million times. It should be noted that “Espresso” only peaked at number three on the Hot 100.
These numbers suggest something that has been true for years: country music fans play a lot of music. Just as much as you might expect some young urban professional to say, “I don’t listen to country music,” you could also expect a country music fan to say, “I only listen to country music.” By 2010, country music was dominating album sales compared to other genres. Five years later, the sentiment continued. With a fiercely dedicated fan base, any potential crossover appeal is a surefire recipe for success. Just look at Taylor Swift’s whole deal. But country music is still its own ecosystem, with dedicated radio stations, record labels, and media engines. The general pop monoculture may have crumbled into subgenres, but the country monoculture was already a subgenre used to staking its own claim. Now that the song has built enough crossover success on its own, there’s no way that her label is going to miss a chance to push it wider.
“Choosin’ Texas” turned one year old on October 17th, 2025. The song hit number one the following February. The music video wasn’t released until April 1st, after the song topped the charts for two months. The song’s media narrative keeps playing out without the label having to do anything, including everyone trying to cash in on the web search around the idea that people haven’t heard the longest-running number one song of all time, including this very piece. Don’t worry: the label will take action when it needs to. It may seem odd that you haven’t heard the song yet, but rest assured, you will. It just needs to become less popular before that happens.
Jesse Raub is a freelance food and culture writer and 20-year coffee industry veteran. He’s written for outlets like Serious Eats, Bon Appétit, The Atlantic, and Vulture. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin, and when he’s not writing, you can find him enjoying cheap wine or expensive coffee in his backyard.