Country Star Earns Fifth No. 1 Hit 9 Years After Beginning Career
Ella Langley has reached an exciting career milestone.
Over the weekend, the 27-year-old country singer officially notched her fifth career No. 1 song on country radio for her hit, "Be Her," which served as the second single for her successful studio album, Dandelion.
Since writing her first song in 2017, Langley has had four other of her tracks hit No. 1: her two collaborations with Riley Green - "you look like you love me (ft Riley Green)" and "Don't Mind If I Do" - and her solo songs "weren't for the wind" and "Choosin' Texas," the latter being the lead single for Dandelion that became a global succcess and marked her first Billboard Hot 100.
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"Be Her" is the sixth track on Dandelion, where Langley sings about self-reflection, personal growth and the desire for a simple life. The song finds herself wishing she could emulate a woman who seemingly has her life perfectly put together.
In an interview on the Katie & Company radio show, Langley explained how she and her three songwriters - HARDY, Smith Ahnquist and Jordan Schmidt - came up with the concept, melody and title for "Be Her," and it was written in 30 minutes.
"Jordan was playing this one track, and one of us had the title 'Be Her.' He played that track, all I heard was, 'I just wanna be her so bad, it hurts so bad...I just wanna be her,'" Langley explained. "When you write songs, whether those lyrics are gonna change or not, it's good to get into how the cadence of the lyrics are moving around… I kind of fill it in like a puzzle afterwards. So I just kept singing that, and all of us were like, ‘Oh, that feels amazing.'"
Despite the song being fun and easy to sing, "Be Her" tackles a deep subject matter, and it's really an admission of the type of woman Langley wants to be one day. The "Loving Life Again" singer says that the lyrics are "really her truth."
"It's not about being someone else; it's about being the her you want to be," Langley continued. "I think there's things that every single person on this planet would like to see themselves do better as a human being, you know what I mean? If you don't, I do not want to be around you. I do not want to be around you at all. I was just honest; those are all things that I'm looking forward to in my life, changing about myself a little bit."
Growing up in a musically-inclined family in Alabama, Langley's first introduction to music was through her church and jam sessions with her community. She started performing locally when she was just a junior in high school, before attending Auburn University to study forestry, and continued to perform across Alabama in various bars and festivals.
In 2021, she signed her first publishing deal with Sony Music Publishing Nashville, then a record deal with Sony Music Nashville and Columbia Records. By then, she had already co-written multiple hit songs for other artists, put out her own singles and even opened for Jon Pardi and Riley Green on their tours before releasing her debut album, Hungover, in August 2024. Not only did her first album debut at No. 77 on the Billboard 200 and No. 11 on the Top Country Albums chart, the single "you look like you love me" featuring Green also gained traction on TikTok and became her first entry on the Billboard Hot 100.
A year and two months after Hungover was released, Langley put out "Choosin' Texas," which also went viral on TikTok and reached No. 1 on the Hot 100, Hot Country Songs and Country Airplay charts all at once. Co-written and co-produced by Miranda Lambert. "Choosin' Texas" spent 10 weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100, the longest reign among female country singers. Her second album, Dandelion, was released this past April and debuted at the top of the Billboard 200.
"With this record, I wanted people to get to know who I am," Langley told Cold Alan of The Highway, a radio show aired by SiriusXM, while promoting Dandelion. "I keep saying that Hungover was the thing that maybe brought them to the table, but Dandelion's going to be the one that makes them sit down and eat. And for that, this is who I am. You could listen to this record and not meet me, not listen to me and you could understand who I was as a person and where I come from and kind of what got me here."
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This story was originally published June 15, 2026 at 3:37 PM.