ELLA LANGLEY - Dandelion

From Nanci Griffith to Reba McEntire, Pam Tillis, Tanya Tucker, Trisha Yearwood. If we tried to list all the musical debts Ella Langley owes to those names for her songs, we could be here all night.
The new country woman from Alabama is now on everyone's lips, at least on the other side of the Atlantic. And after appearing on Jimmy Fallon alongside her inseparable Riley Green, Langley has also landed the massive success of the single "Choosin' Texas", which reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100, giving the musician her first single to top a chart spanning all genres — a milestone preceded by no fewer than seven awards won at the 2026 ACM Awards.

With these premises, Ella Langley's second album, "Dandelion", inevitably arrives loaded with expectations, in a year that is also a particularly sad one, marked as it was by the recent passing of the undisputed queen of country music: Dolly Parton.
And yet, what clashes from the very first notes with all this sudden (and unexpected) rise to the upper echelons of the music world is the sheer mediocrity of the eighteen songs on an album watered down with hackneyed melodic solutions and overused chord progressions, cloying at every chorus, starting with the title track that effectively opens the show. A vaguely country-tinged pop ditty that adds nothing to the millions of syrupy ballads we've heard from the '90s (and of course long before) right up to today.
"Choosin' Texas" itself sounds like a B-side Rosanne Cash might have shelved during her most uncertain years. And the following "We Know Us" and "Low Lights" only amplify that impression, leaving you with the sense of listening to a record knocked out by AI. The frankly baffling numbers racked up by songs like "Be Her", another insipid pop-country trifle that makes you long for nothing less than Shania Twain, only deepen the bewilderment.

In this overly polished rollercoaster of songs that are fine (?) for half a season and nothing more, a few tracks faithful to tradition also turn up, like Kitty Wells's "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels", providing the only genuinely noteworthy moment of the bunch. And no wonder, one might add.
Songs like "Butterfly Season" (and not only that one) will no doubt go on to pad out the playlists of Netflix's serial music supervisors, while others, like "Most Good Things Do", only make you wonder even more why Ella is so beloved compared to the other ten thousand young country singer-songwriters scattered across the States. Mysteries that will remain unsolved for quite a while yet, alas, at least around here.

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28/08/2026