In February, Ella Langley became the first woman ever to simultaneously top the Billboard Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts with her tangy, twangy country rock single “Choosin’ Texas”. It’s the mainstream success that the 26-year-old Alabamian farm girl’s been chasing all her life. “Did anything and everything to get where I’m at, and damn if it don’t feel good!” she sings on her second album, Dandelion. But later on the same song, “Somethin’ Simple”, she concedes that while “living the dream” she still cherishes the basics: “A house on the hill, horse in the yard, a dog at my feet, pickin’ my guitar, supper on the stove, hard-workin’ man taking off his dirty work clothes…”
So – although Langley first found fame singing covers on TikTok – there’s no reinventing the wagon wheel on this rich and accomplished record. There’s a classic feel to her assured blend of polished Nashville radio sounds, rootsier strumming, barbecue soul and 1970s rock arrangements (complete with the odd swirl of strings and hand claps). Langley’s a confident old-school songwriter with a great, straight-shootin’ voice: it recalls peak Shania Twain in an ability to bounce from fun to heartbreak, pure notes with a dusty little husk. When Langley saddles up, she takes a song by its reins. In recent interviews, she’s said she fought her label hard to keep the spoken sections they hated on the Riley Green duet “You Look Like You Love Me” – which turned out to be the breakthrough single from her 2024 debut album, Hungover. “If I go in and cut something, it's because I believe in it,” she said. And these 15 new songs are delivered with the head-held-high spirit of a woman who’s just shown The Man that her instincts are right.
Dandelion nails its colours to a traditionalist mast with bookending snatches of the old folk tune “Froggy Went a Courtin’” (which she used to sing with her paternal grandfather) and a swaggeringly good cover of Kitty Wells’s feminist country classic “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”. Dandelion’s title song is a brand statement in which Langley sings over a mellow sway of pedal steel and thumped drums that she’ll always have “The Bible in my blood, and the ’Bama in my veins”.
Langley’s love songs find her yearning for cowboys to love her “from the bottom of your boots to the top of your hat”. On the mellow, organ-backed “Me and You Time” she just wants a break from her busy schedule. “Gotta Quit” is a line dance bop that sees her trying to shake the memory of “that night on your grandpa’s farm – scram!” When she’s unlucky in love, as on the Miranda Lambert co-write “Choosin’ Texas” (with its Eaglesesque highway guitars and flecks of mandolin) she’s always reaching for a glass of “Jack”. If you made a drinking game of taking a shot every time she mentions her favourite whiskey, then you’d be loaded by the end. Although on the breezy “Be Her” she also longs to be the kind of woman who “drinks wine by the glass, not by the bottle”.
Her work leans so heavily on the standard barroom furniture of the genre that, on the page at least, it seems formulaic. It’s Langley’s assured craftswomanship and intentional delivery that keep her from slipping into cliche. Even when it’s “Last Call for Us”, Langley’s still standing. This is a solid, saloon-door-slammer of a country classic.
