Choosin' Texas
Ella Langley
How to study this song
“Choosin' Texas” carries 23 English words, 5 adjectives and 23 verb forms — 51 study entries in all, graded A2. Start with the glossary: love, arms and match come up again and again, so they are the ones to know first. This one leans on its verbs: 23 distinct forms against 5 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| EN | ES | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| love | amor | amore | amour | amor | liefde | Liebe |
| arms | brazos | braccia | bras | braços | armen | Arme |
| match | rival | rivale | rival | rival | tegenstander | Gegner |
| kind | tipo | tipo | genre | tipo |
What this song teaches you
Level · A2
- Vocabulary words
- 23
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 14
- Expressions
- 10
- Verb forms
- 25
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Choosin' Texas» is a country song by the American singer and songwriter Ella Langley, who was born in 1999 in Hope Hull, a small community near Montgomery, Alabama. She wrote it with three Nashville names: the star Miranda Lambert, the songwriter and producer Luke Dick and the writer Joybeth Taylor. Langley produced the track herself together with Ben West and Lambert, and, according to Wikipedia, Lambert also sings in the backing vocals. The single was released on 17 October 2025 by Sawgod, Sony Music Nashville and Columbia, and it became the lead single of her second studio album, «Dandelion», which came out on 10 April 2026.
The idea was born at a songwriting retreat in late 2024. Several reports, including The Irish News and the country site Holler, tell the same story. Lambert, who is from Texas, was sharing funny memories from her youth, and one of them was about the day a police officer stopped her car while her pet kangaroo was sitting in the passenger seat. Her car had Texas number plates, and Langley joked that the officer must have guessed at once where this driver came from. That joke became the hook of the song. Langley has said that the melody almost wrote itself after that; Wikipedia says the whole song was finished in about thirty minutes, and in another interview she spoke of thirty to forty-five.
The song tells a simple and painful story. The narrator is a woman from Tennessee who believed that her man had finally learned to love her home state. Then she made the mistake of taking him on a trip back to Abilene, a city in West Texas. There he meets a Texan woman, and the narrator watches him dancing the two-step with her across the floor. One look at his happy face is enough: she knows that she has lost him, and she ends the night drinking whiskey on her own.
In the second part she remembers everything they shared in Tennessee: the rain over the Smoky Mountains, the old songs of a country singer called Hank, which most listeners take as a nod to Hank Williams, and the blues of Memphis. She realises that the signs were there from the start, because his favourite song had always been «Amarillo by Morning», George Strait's famous ballad about a Texas cowboy. In the bridge she drives east on Interstate 40, the highway that links the Texas Panhandle with Tennessee, and every mile feels lonelier than the one before, because his heart never left the Lone Star State.