Feature Friday: A Pet Kangaroo, a Thirty-Minute Writing Session, and Now a Drake Song -- the Full Life of 'Choosin' Texas'

This column covered “Choosin’ Texas” once already, back in August, as the story of a plain breakup song refusing to leave the chart. That piece is still accurate as far as it goes, but it stopped the story early. In the two months since, Ella Langley’s single didn’t just keep climbing – it became the single longest-reigning No. 1 in Billboard Hot 100 history, outright, and then, a week after finally losing the top spot, it became something stranger still: raw material. Monday’s column noted, almost in passing, that Drake and Don Toliver’s new single “Solar Eclipse” builds its hook directly out of “Choosin’ Texas”’s own melody. That detail deserves the full treatment, because the complete arc – from a pet kangaroo anecdote at a Nashville writing retreat to a Top 5 hip-hop record borrowing its chorus – is one of the stranger full-circle stories this column has tracked all year.

Start where the August piece started, because the record is worth re-stating precisely now that it’s final. At an October 2024 songwriting retreat, Miranda Lambert told Langley, Luke Dick, and Joybeth Taylor a story about getting pulled over while driving with Texas plates, her dog on the passenger seat and, improbably, a pet kangaroo in the back. Langley turned one incidental detail – the Texas plates – into a lyric, “She’s from Texas, I can tell,” and the four of them finished the song in roughly thirty minutes. It was recorded at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, produced by Langley, Lambert, and Ben West, and released October 17, 2025, as the lead single from Langley’s sophomore album Dandelion.

What happened on the chart afterward is now, simply, the biggest story in the song’s history. “Choosin’ Texas” first reached No. 1 in February 2026 and proceeded to make six separate ascents back to the top spot over the following eight months – falling, re-entering the top 10, and climbing back to No. 1 again, repeatedly, in a way almost no song in the chart’s history has managed. By early October, it had accumulated 24 total weeks at No. 1, non-consecutive, surpassing Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” (22 cumulative weeks, built across multiple holiday seasons since 1994) for the longest total reign atop the Hot 100 of any song ever, holiday or otherwise. It finally ceded the position on the chart dated October 10, dethroned by Taylor Swift’s “Patient Zero” – a changing of the guard this column covered that same week, calling “Patient Zero” a competent song wearing a No. 1’s clothes. “Choosin’ Texas” settled at No. 2 the following week and has stayed in the top five since, nine months after its original release, longer than almost any other record this column has tracked in 2026.

The Drake connection started well before “Solar Eclipse” existed as a finished song. Drake had been publicly, visibly taken with Langley’s record for months – commenting “Goated pen” under one of her Instagram posts, attending her tour stop in North Little Rock, Arkansas, and previewing an early, unofficial remix during a club set in Houston. That early version ran into friction: backstage footage of Drake and Langley together was quietly removed from Drake’s own re-upload of the material, and a Cledus T. Judd parody of “Choosin’ Texas” was separately pulled after reported pressure from Langley’s label, protective of the song’s still-unfolding chart-record campaign. None of that drama survived into the version that actually released. “Solar Eclipse,” officially credited to Drake and Don Toliver, arrived October 2 on the deluxe “Encore” edition of Drake’s Habibti (FOMO) – Drake repeating a lightly altered version of Langley’s own chorus hook, Toliver running the same melody through a chopped Bun B sample and swapping “Jack” for “yak,” the two of them relocating the song’s entire musical identity into Auto-Tuned hip-hop/R&B while leaving its central musical idea almost entirely intact. It debuted at No. 5 the week “Choosin’ Texas” fell to No. 2 – three spots behind the song whose hook it’s built on.

It’s worth sitting with how unusual that sequencing actually is. Interpolations and samples routinely borrow from older catalog material, decades removed from the original hit’s chart run – that’s the entire premise of this week’s Throwback Thursday column. It is much rarer for a song to borrow directly from a single still actively charting in the same genre-adjacent neighborhood, let alone one that had, days earlier, set the all-time record for weeks at No. 1. Drake didn’t reach back into music history for “Solar Eclipse” – he reached sideways, into a song still unfolding its own chart story in real time, and built a Top 5 hit by borrowing a hook that, by any normal accounting, hadn’t finished being news yet.

That’s the full shape of “Choosin’ Texas”’s year, and it’s a genuinely rare one: a plain, unhurried breakup song, written in half an hour off an anecdote about a kangaroo, that spent eight months setting an all-time chart record one non-consecutive week at a time, got dethroned by pop’s biggest current star, and then immediately became source material for a different genre’s hit single – all while it was still, itself, sitting in the Hot 100’s top five. Most songs get one act. This one is still writing its second.

Hero image: Ella Langley performing live, 2026, by Rick Munroe, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.