If you’re one of the many people who have expressed shock over the past two weeks that Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” became the longest-running Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 of all time, it’s basically understandable.
After all, what if you were to tailor a song to become the most indomitable No. 1 hit in the history of the Hot 100, simply by looking at the history of American popular music and that of the United States. Billboard on the charts, it probably wouldn’t sound like Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas.” It would be a more emotional song written by a bigger-name superstar artist (or two), it would have all kinds of narrative hooks built into its lyrics, sound, and backstory, and it would have a full promotional plan behind it designed not only to make it initially ubiquitous, but continually unignorable. It would seem historic long before it became historic.
It’s not “Choose Texas.” It’s not totally not “Choosin’ Texas,” of course — the song is a clear hit from a quickly rising star with a number of fascinating mid-2020s tidbits to discuss about it and a handful of pretty culturally significant looks. But did it seem historical from the get-go, as did the megastar team of Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men and “One Sweet Day”‘s No. 1 for 16 weeks? Or even just a little bit after the bat, like Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee and Justin Bieber’s 16-week No. 1 “Despacito,” or Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus’ 19-week culture-changing “Old Town Road”? Not particularly.
In fact, at many points during its run up to 24 weeks at No. 1 (according to this week’s rankings dated Oct. 3), “Texas” seemed on the verge of failing. When it fell from its new Hot 100 peak of No. 11 to No. 27 last December, buried by the annual avalanche of holiday titles, it seemed like it might have missed its chance to even reach the top 10. When it rebounded from the holiday rush and reached No. 1 on Feb. 14, it seemed to be in a bind with Olivia Dean’s “Man I Need,” which climbed just as long – and if it lost that week, it could have been canned by a looming Bad Bunny Super Bowl performance and a new video and physical single from Taylor Swift, which propelled both artists to No. 1 in the weeks that followed. Then, having already spent a combined 10 weeks at No. 1, “Texas” was absent from the top spot from late May to June — replaced by new singles from three of the world’s biggest pop stars, Drake, Ariana Grande and (again) Swift.
Each time, it felt like the end of the Hot 100 “Choosin’ Texas” story — and a logical, not particularly ill-fitting, ending for a song that could have disappeared at any of those times and was still considered both a major hit for Langley and one of the biggest country songs of the past year. And each time, he came back even stronger — without much obvious pressure from Langley, his team or the culture at large — to the point where he now stands alone, not only in his catalog and among crossover country hits, but among the Hot 100’s 68-year history.
So how did this happen? And why has it inspired not only such surprise, but such fury among those who have only just learned of the existence of “Choosin’ Texas” and its domination of the charts in recent weeks?
How rankings have changed over the past decade, especially at the top
The most important thing to understand about “Texas” and its 24-week stay at No. 1 is that if it had been released two decades earlier — or even a decade earlier — not only would it have no chance of spending that long at No. 1, but it probably wouldn’t have sniffed at the top spot at all. It’s not about how the song might have fit less well into the country landscape of 2005 or 2015 — in truth, the song’s laid-back timelessness is one of its most endearing and immediately apparent qualities. It’s simply a matter of seeing how much the Hot 100 and the country’s place within it have changed over those decades.
First of all, between the time Lonestar’s “Amazed” reached the top of the Hot 100 in 2000 and Morgan Wallen’s first No. 1 with “Last Night” in 2023, only two country songs (defined as songs eligible for Billboard‘s Hot Country Songs) broke the list – both by Swift and both with at least one foot already clearly in the pop world. For the vast majority of the 21st century, the top spot on the Hot 100 has conspicuously been off-limits to country artists. But with the genre gaining a foothold in the streaming era of the 2020s, generating massive stars like Wallen and Zach Bryan, and even gradually slipping into top 40 radio — especially as hip-hop, by far streaming’s most dominant genre of the first decade, saw its supremacy erode — country’s chart ceiling has risen significantly. Today, 11 of the 32 songs from Billboard history of topping the Hot 100 and Country Songs since 2023, and earlier this year the entire top five on the chart was filled with country songs for the very first time.
But country’s suddenly wide-open door to the top of the Hot 100 is just one of two biggest chart transformations to consider when discussing the “Choosin’ Texas” run, and arguably the smaller of the two. The other is that the turnover on the chart has slowed down significantly, especially in its upper tier. As the biggest radio stations shrink their playlists and keep them increasingly static – and the majority of streaming listening shifts from curated editorial playlists to algorithmic personalized listening and autoplay – songs are lasting longer than ever before, while artists, labels and tastemakers in general have less power than ever to redirect audiences’ listening habits from one single to the next. (It’s telling that even in the midst of his “Choosin’ Texas” run, Langley also scored two huge follow-up hits on the chart — “Be Her,” which reached No. 2, and Wallen’s duet “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” a No. 4 hit — both of which rose and fell on the chart without disrupting his “Choosin’ Texas” run at all.)
As a result, the week that “Texas” set the Hot 100 record with its 23rd week at the top, it was one of eight songs in the top 10 that had previously spent double-digit weeks in the region – along 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 increasingly having to compete not only with each other, but also with catalog hits from the recent (and not-so-recent) past, and even a once-vibrant viral needle engine like TikTok finding its audience more divided than ever, breakout hits have been few and far between over the past year. As a result, the Hot 100’s top 100 is increasingly filled with new debuts from established big-name artists and the same hits that have been dominating for months already.
This long-standing chart trend toward slower pacing and longer hits can be seen in the number of songs in the past 10 years that have claimed the same record that “Choosin’ Texas” just broke. For more than 21 years, beginning in early 1996, the record for most weeks at No. 1 belonged to one song and one song only: “One Sweet Day,” which reigned for 16 weeks, a Hot 100 record from which no other song arrived in less than a week. Then, in September 2017, “Despacito” equalized the length to 16 weeks. Both songs then got a boost two years later, when “Old Town Road” spent 19 weeks at No. 1 in 2019. Five years later, Shaboozey matched that by spending 19 weeks at No. 1 with his 2024 smash “A Bar Song (Tipsy).” And then, from last December to January, Carey topped them all with four extra weeks for her now-annual No. 1 holiday “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” giving her a total of 22 weeks. With the addition of the Langley race, a mark that sat untouched in the record books for 21 years has now been matched or surpassed five times in the past decade.
Why so many listeners chose “Texas”
All of this explains why the Hot 100 was primed for a song like Ella Langley’s “Choosin’ Texas” to take over like never before in chart history. But why was it “Choosin’ Texas” specifically that became the song to rise to the occasion? That question is one that countless casual chart watchers have asked themselves over the past week – sometimes loudly and angrily – and it’s a little more complicated to answer.
“Texas” certainly has many of the qualities of a great, lasting country hit. It has a memorable title, an unforgettable chorus, a clever (and tried-and-true conceit), a melody that flows incredibly well, production that recalls past eras without sounding explicitly retro, and lyrics that express familiar feelings in a new and clever way, delivered convincingly and relevantly by Langley herself. Arriving a year after “You Look Like You Love Me,” peaking at No. 30, first established Ella Langley as a Hot 100-level hitmaker — with Langley scoring several other similarly sized hits in the months that followed, including guesting on songs by rapper BigXthaPlug and her “Love Me” duet partner Riley Green — the initial chart success of the sublime “Texas” wasn’t at all surprising.
Then it continued to grow. While the song survived the holiday slump and cracked the top 10 on the Hot 100 in January – distinguishing itself from Langley’s previous hits to that point – it was clear there was something more…
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