Choosin' Texas Hit a 25th Week at No. 1

Ella Langley performing at the Greek Theatre in 2026.

The song started with a kangaroo. Ella Langley was on a writers’ retreat with Miranda Lambert, their first time writing together, when Lambert told a story about being pulled over with her pet kangaroo in the passenger seat. The kangaroo got her out of the ticket, Lambert said, adding: “Of course, I had Texas plates, too.” Forty-five minutes later they had “Choosin’ Texas”, and on the Billboard Hot 100 dated 31 October that song spent a 25th week at No. 1, extending the longest reign at the top since the chart began in August 1958.

It is a country two-step about heartbreak, carried by a writer from Alabama, and it has spent longer at No. 1 than any pop release of the year. The record says as much about how people now hear music as it does about the song.

Where the Song Came From

Langley told the retreat story to Billboard, which describes the track as a two-stepping, midtempo song about a heartbreak. She wrote it with Lambert, Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor, and she and Lambert co-produced the recording with Ben West. Langley, who also produces, has since set marks as a writer and producer as well as a performer.

The record came out on 17 October 2025 through SAWGOD/Columbia Records, with Triple Tigers working it to country radio. It reached No. 1 on the Hot 100 for the first time in February and, in the same week, topped Country Airplay. That week made Langley the only woman to lead the Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay at the same time with one song, according to Billboard.

The writing credit is part of the record. Because Lambert co-wrote and co-produced it, Billboard counts Langley and Lambert as the women country artist-songwriters with the longest-leading Hot 100 No. 1, a mark the song took from “I Will Always Love You”, the 14-week No. 1 that Dolly Parton wrote and Whitney Houston recorded for The Bodyguard.

Seven Separate Runs at the Top

The 25 weeks did not come in a single streak. “Choosin’ Texas” has now had seven distinct stays at No. 1: on the charts dated 14 February; 7 March; 21 to 28 March; 11 to 25 April; 9 to 23 May; 4 July to 3 October; and now 31 October, according to Billboard’s chart report. That is the most separate No. 1 runs for a song within a single release cycle.

Between its first and latest week at the top, nine other songs led the Hot 100: Bad Bunny’s “DtMF”, Taylor Swift’s “Opalite”, Bruno Mars’s “I Just Might”, BTS’s “Swim”, Olivia Rodrigo’s “Drop Dead”, Drake’s “Janice STFU”, Ariana Grande’s “Hate That I Made You Love Me”, and Swift’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” and “Patient Zero”. Each displaced it for a week or more. Each time, it came back.

The latest return came after Swift’s “Patient Zero” ended the long summer run on the chart dated 10 October. Three weeks later, the country song was back on top.

The Records It Has Passed

Billboard’s ranking of the longest-leading Hot 100 No. 1s now reads:

“Choosin’ Texas”, Ella Langley, 2026: 25 weeks to date
“All I Want for Christmas Is You”, Mariah Carey, 2019 to 2026: 22 weeks
“A Bar Song (Tipsy)”, Shaboozey, 2024: 19 weeks
“Old Town Road”, Lil Nas X featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, 2019: 19 weeks
“Last Night”, Morgan Wallen, 2023: 16 weeks
“Despacito”, Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee featuring Justin Bieber, 2017: 16 weeks
“One Sweet Day”, Mariah Carey and Boyz II Men, 1995 to 1996: 16 weeks

Three of the top four are country or country-crossover records, a pattern worth noting in a chart built mainly on streaming. On the multimetric Hot Country Songs chart, “Choosin’ Texas” leads for a 46th week, passing “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” for the second-longest run; only Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line’s “Meant To Be”, at 50 weeks in 2017 and 2018, has led longer.

Along the way it passed a run of women’s records. Before overtaking Mariah Carey’s Christmas song, it passed Carey and Boyz II Men’s “One Sweet Day” for the most weeks at No. 1 for a non-holiday song by a woman, and it beat Debby Boone’s 1977 “You Light Up My Life” as the longest-leading country title by a woman.

This Week’s Numbers

In the tracking week of 16 to 22 October, the song drew 20 million official US streams, up 1%, 58.6 million in radio airplay audience, essentially level, and 4,000 sales, down 17%. Those figures returned it to the top from No. 2 even as it fell from No. 1 to No. 4 on Streaming Songs, after a record-tying 26 weeks leading that chart. It holds at its No. 2 high on Radio Songs and drops from No. 2 to No. 5 on Digital Song Sales, after a record 19 weeks at No. 1 there.

The balance explains the staying power. No single metric carries the song on its own. Streaming, radio and sales each hold it near the top, so a strong pop debut can pass it for a week without knocking it far down the chart.

The Crossover Nobody Planned

The strangest part of the run is how many listeners have never heard of the singer. Luminate data shared with Fortune showed that only 24% of US music listeners knew of Ella Langley in the second quarter of 2026, up from 13% in the last quarter of 2025 and 17% in the first quarter of this year.

Fortune’s explanation is fragmentation. Personalised feeds mean a song can dominate the listening of one large audience while barely reaching another, so a record-setting No. 1 can still leave many people asking who sang it.

The crossover has also been collective. In March, Langley and Megan Moroney became the first women primarily known as country artists to top the Hot 100 and the Billboard 200 at the same time, with “Choosin’ Texas” and Moroney’s Cloud 9. On the Hot Country Songs chart dated 1 August, women held the entire top five for a seventh consecutive week, and Langley had three of those five places.

What the Album Around It Has Done

“Choosin’ Texas” is the lead of a wider run for Langley’s album Dandelion, which has earned more than 100,000 equivalent album units in four different weeks, the first time a country album by a woman has done that since the Billboard 200 began counting units in December 2014. Three more songs from it have led Country Airplay: “Be Her”, “I Can’t Love You Anymore” with Morgan Wallen, and “Loving Life Again”.

When “Choosin’ Texas” and “Be Her” sat at Nos. 1 and 2 on the Hot 100 on charts in May, Langley became the first artist known mainly for country music to hold the top two spots for more than one week. She has led Billboard’s Country Songwriters chart for 28 weeks and its Country Producers chart for 10, records among women in both cases. The song has even been borrowed: Drake and Don Toliver’s “Solar Eclipse”, which entered the Hot 100 at No. 5, interpolates it.

With the country awards season under way, as musicroots.news noted when Chris Stapleton went for a ninth CMA Male Vocalist award, the open question is how long the Hot 100 record will stand. Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” tends to return to No. 1 each December, and at 22 weeks it would need four more to take the record back outright, even if “Choosin’ Texas” adds no more.