I am officially old.
The number of moons which are ahead of me are definitely fewer than the ones that have already passed, and while I can currently outwalk Triste Mietitore, there will be a time when I will be unable to do so. My place will remember me not, and after I have shuffled off this mortal coil, the bits that used to make up my electro-mechanical substance will at some point rot.
What does this have to do with "Choosing Texas" by Ella Langley? Because I am officially old. I do not really listen to the Top 50; so that means if a song does happen to come across my radar, it must be pretty epically huge. "Choosing Texas" by Ella Langley is such a song.
"Choosing Texas" by Ella Langley has been bouncing around the ARIA Top 5 now for about 25 weeks. If there is a song for 2026, then it is either this or "Ordinary" by Alex Warren, or perhaps "The Fate Of Ophelia" by Taylor Swift.
The big question that I have about "Choosing Texas" by Ella Langley is "why?". Why is a fairly middling country and western song, which sounds like it could have come from literally any time from 1950 onwards, sitting at Number 1 on the ARIA Charts? Australians don't really have the same kind of cultural associations about Texas and where it fits into the Union as Americans do; so from that perspective it is one step orphaned from the cultural ties which it very obviously has.
It is vastly different than the electro dance pop borderline slop that makes up most of the Top 50. It is reasonably simply orchestrated. It doesn't particularly sound like it has been autotuned beyond what is sensible. It has an acoustic guitar, a steel guitar, a bass, and some drums. This is 100% absolutely not the kind of song which people would be taking nitazenes and dancing underneath coloured and strobe lights to.
To be honest, pop and hip-hop music has been awash with songs about the artist bragging about themselves, for about 25 years. Perhaps the most idiotic example of this is Ariane Grande's "7 Rings" which is a rip-off of "My Favourite Things" from Rodgers and Hammerstein's "The Sound of Music, with the repeated words 'I want it, I got it.' repeated over and over.
There's only so much of that that you can listen to before it wears thin; and that's why in an age of YouTube and Spotify, the real irony is that the Top 50 is now even smaller in the public psyche that it was when there were physical record stores.
No. Instead "Choosin' Texas" is about the painful realization that this a lover's heart still belongs to his home state and an old flame from that state. She watches him slip away mentally when she sees him acting like the person he was before he met her and like any irrational person in a country song, she decides to drown out the pain by dowsing it in alcohol (in this case Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey, which is presumably where the narrator in the song is from, as opposed to Ella Langley).
it also does an interesting trick which we have seen in other songs like this. It names the romantic rival:
Just when I thought I got him to fall in love with Tennessee
I shoulda known better than to take him back to Abilene
I put him right back into her arms
I wasn't a match for that kinda spark
Compare that "Jolene" by Dolly Parton:
Your beauty is beyond compare
With flaming locks of auburn hair
With ivory skin and eyes of emerald green
Your smile is like a breath of spring
Your voice is soft like summer rain
And I cannot compete with you, Jolene
Or perhaps "Put The Gun Down" by ZZ Ward
Adeline, have mercy
You don't wanna break my heart
Take what's mine, don't hurt me
Steal my money, steal my car
Don't take my man, don't take my man
I said, don't take my man 'cause you know you can
Put the gun down, ooh
In all three of these songs, there is a rawness about the vocal delivery which helps sell the emotion of them. I don't think that it would be possible to deliver a happy pop song about dancing and partying with that kind of almost vocal fry and failure in the vowels.
"Choosin' Texas" is a song about someone who can't get what they want. This is a song about having had something and lost it. "Choosin' Texas" is a normal, routine country and western song. What makes this particularly strange and why it has resonated with so many people is because in 2026 it is vastly different to the rest of the Top 50.
This song works because this song, is essentially a human song, written for humans. This is a song written for and about the world that normal humans live in. While that sounds normal and even a little bit boring, when placed against the rest of the Top 50, that's really really weird now.
