Miranda Lambert Recalls “Butting Heads” With Ella Langley While Making Music Together
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For any artist, perfecting the music they want to share with the world can be overwhelming. Miranda Lambert and Ella Langley know that feeling all too well.
Lambert opened up about collaborating with Langley during a recent appearance on The New York Times’ Popcast. She admitted tensions ran high while they worked together.
As most people probably know by now, the two country stars have proven to be a pretty good team when it comes to making successful music. Lambert helped co-write Langley’s massive hit “Choosin’ Texas,” and she co-produced Langley’s entire Dandelion album.
They also have two duets together, “Butterfly Season” and “Snakeskin Boots.”
Miranda Lambert Recalls “Butting Heads” With Ella Langley
As they started creating an album together, Lambert gave Langley one piece of advice. She warned: “If we don’t fight by the end of this, we probably didn’t do it right.”
“There was hard parts of it. Creating a record is not… I mean, it’s a long journey, you know what I mean? And it’s a lot of emotions,” she continued.
When asked if she and Langley ever found themselves “butting heads” while creating the album, she didn’t hesitate to be honest.
“We did a lot,” she admitted. “And I think that’s important, because we needed to.”
“I’m scrappy. … I wanted it to be right, you know what I mean?” she added.
At the end of the day, though, the two stars knew that challenging each other would help them create something great.
“I mean … it’s her name,” Lambert continued. “But, yeah, it was a good balance, I felt like, of bouncing songs off each other, saying like, ‘That’s too far one way,’ or ‘That doesn’t fit the record,’ whatever it was. And I love that she trusted me with that. I really do.”
Lambert clarified that when it came to “Choosin’ Texas,” though, the two never once disagreed.
If you don’t know the background behind the track, they actually wrote the song in just 30 minutes at a songwriting retreat.
“That one is just like… it’s like a piece of our DNA,” Lambert said about “Choosin’ Texas. “It’s like there’s this nostalgia to it, and it’s like her love for country and my love for country. That one, whether it was the writing of it, just fell out of the production. It was just like, ‘This is what it’s supposed to be. Let’s let it be.’”
And sometimes, creating a song that makes history really can be that easy.
“Choosin’ Texas” spent 24 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, breaking the record for the longest-running No. 1 song in the chart’s history.
During the week of October 5, the song dropped to No. 2 on the chart. However, Langley could still add to her record if “Choosin’ Texas” returns to No. 1, since the record counts non-consecutive weeks at the top.
You can watch Miranda Lambert talk about working with Ella Langley in the video below.
