By the time Ella Langley sent Morgan Wallen “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” the two Alabama-born country artists already had a connection built through live performances and touring.

But the song wasn't written as a calculated superstar duet.

Langley wrote it with Austin Goodloe and Joybeth Taylor, then later sent it to Wallen. When the pair introduced the song together onstage in Alabama in April 2026, Wallen told the audience that Langley had sent it to him only about a month earlier—and that he loved it. 

That simple exchange turned a heartbreak song into the first official collaboration between two artists whose careers had followed very different paths into country music.

Ella Langley built her career from Alabama

Langley grew up in Hope Hull, Alabama, surrounded by music and storytelling.

She began performing publicly as a teenager, playing bars, festivals and other venues around the Southeast before moving to Nashville in 2019.

Her arrival came at an awkward moment. Within months, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down much of the live-music business.

Instead of stopping her progress, the interruption pushed Langley deeper into songwriting.

She spent the downtime learning how to finish songs and turn her experiences into material. That development eventually led to her 2023 EP Excuse the Mess and her 2024 debut album, hungover.

By 2026, she had reached another stage of her career with her second album, Dandelion.

That project arrived shortly before “I Can’t Love You Anymore.”

Morgan Wallen took a different road to Nashville

Morgan Wallen was born in Sneedville, Tennessee, and grew up in a musical family. His father was a pastor, while his mother was a teacher.

Sports were initially a major part of Wallen's life.

He played baseball seriously and hoped the game might provide his future. An elbow injury during high school changed that direction.

Music eventually took over.

Wallen gained national exposure in 2014 when he appeared on NBC's The Voice. He didn't win the competition, but the experience helped move him toward Nashville and a professional recording career.

His debut album, If I Know Me, arrived in 2018. He followed it with Dangerous: The Double Album in 2021, One Thing at a Time in 2023 and I'm the Problem in 2025.

By the time Langley approached him about “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” Wallen had become one of country music's most prominent performers.

But their connection wasn't based simply on fame.

They had already shared a stage.

Langley and Wallen had performed together before the song

Langley joined Wallen during his touring activity in 2025, giving the two artists an opportunity to perform together before recording an official duet.

Their relationship also included some good-natured teasing.

Langley later discussed Wallen during an appearance on Theo Von's This Past Weekend, including a story about forgetting lyrics while performing with him. Wallen apparently didn't let her forget it.

That familiarity matters when listening to “I Can’t Love You Anymore.”

The record requires two singers to sound as though they're occupying the same emotional space rather than simply taking turns delivering lines.

Their previous stage experience helped make the pairing feel natural.

Langley wrote the song before Wallen joined it

One of the most important facts about “I Can’t Love You Anymore” is that Morgan Wallen is not one of its credited songwriters.

The composition is credited to Ella Langley, Austin Goodloe and Joybeth Taylor. Apple Music and the official recording credits confirm the three writers. 

Langley then sent the song to Wallen.

During their live debut, Wallen explained that she had sent it to him about a month earlier and that he immediately liked it. 

That tells us something useful about the song's origin.

It wasn't built around the idea of putting two famous names together.

The song existed first.

The collaboration followed.

The song lives in the aftermath of a breakup

“I Can’t Love You Anymore” deals with a relationship that is supposedly finished but refuses to disappear emotionally.

The narrator knows what she's supposed to do.

Move on.

Stop thinking about the person.

Stop needing them.

The problem is that ordinary objects keep reopening the relationship.

A lighter left behind becomes a reminder. An old photograph brings another memory back. The empty side of a bed feels occupied by someone's absence.

The song's central contradiction is contained directly in its title.

Saying “I can't love you anymore” should represent closure.

Instead, repeating it reveals how little closure has actually happened.

The head has reached one conclusion.

The heart hasn't.

That's what gives the song its emotional tension.

Small details make the heartbreak believable

Rather than describing the breakup in abstract terms, the writers use physical reminders.

That approach fits Langley's songwriting style.

A forgotten lighter isn't important because of what the object is worth. It's important because it unexpectedly transports someone back into a relationship they are trying to leave behind.

The same thing happens with the photograph.

These aren't dramatic symbols created solely to make the song sound poetic.

They're the kinds of objects people really do encounter after relationships end.

That's why the story works.

The narrator isn't actively trying to relive the relationship.

The memories keep finding her.

The production reinforces the mood

The recording has a substantial Nashville studio lineup.

Langley and Ben West are credited as producers, while co-writer Austin Goodloe served as a producer/vocal producer and contributed piano, guitars, programming, synthesizer and keyboards. 

The musicians include some notable Nashville players.

Tom Bukovac and Ben Flanders contribute electric guitar. Rachel Loy plays bass, Aaron Sterling handles drums and percussion, Charlie Worsham contributes acoustic guitar and mandolin, and Spencer Cullum supplies pedal steel. Ben West also plays Hammond organ. 

Those instruments give the recording a full country foundation without overwhelming the vocals.

The production leaves enough room for Langley and Wallen to carry the emotional story.

They introduced it live before releasing it

Before listeners received the finished recording, Langley and Wallen gave the song a live introduction.

The pair premiered “I Can’t Love You Anymore” during Wallen's April 18, 2026 show in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. 

The location was appropriate.

Langley is from Alabama, and her Southern background has remained central to her identity as a songwriter and performer.

Less than a week later, the studio recording arrived.

Apple Music lists the official single release as April 24, 2026, issued through SAWGOD Records/Columbia. The official Ella Langley upload carries the same release date. 

An official lyric video accompanied the release. 

The song arrived during Langley's Dandelion era

“I Can’t Love You Anymore” appeared at a particularly active point in Langley's career.

Her second studio album, Dandelion, had arrived shortly before the duet.

The album represented another step in her development as both performer and songwriter, while maintaining the personal storytelling that had defined her earlier work.

“I Can’t Love You Anymore” fits naturally beside that material even though its release followed the original album.

More importantly, it demonstrates how Langley's role was expanding.

She wasn't merely the vocalist on the record.

She helped write it.

She produced it.

Then she decided Morgan Wallen was the person she wanted singing alongside her.

Two voices, one unresolved goodbye

The strongest element of “I Can’t Love You Anymore” is its refusal to pretend that ending a relationship automatically ends the feelings attached to it.

There is no complicated plot.

Someone is gone.

The narrator knows the relationship should remain over.

Yet memories keep breaking through every attempt to move forward.

Bringing Morgan Wallen into the song turns that internal struggle into something that feels shared. His voice adds another perspective without changing the fundamental idea Langley and her co-writers created.

That's ultimately what makes the collaboration interesting.

Ella Langley didn't begin with Morgan Wallen and search for a song worthy of the pairing.

She began with a song.

Then she sent it to someone she believed belonged inside it.

Discover more artists and songs on the CLE Radio Power 40.

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Stella Lefty didn't need a carefully planned recording session to begin writing “Boston.”

She needed a piano, a few spare minutes and a crush.

While waiting in Nashville for a guy she liked to pick her up, Lefty sat at a piano and began playing around. The chorus of what would become “Boston” appeared quickly. She posted an unfinished piece of the song online before the record was complete.

Listeners wanted more.

That spontaneous moment helped introduce a much larger audience to an artist who had been writing songs since childhood but had spent years uncertain about whether she actually wanted to stand in front of an audience and sing them herself. 

Stella Lefty started writing as a child

Lefty grew up in the Chicago area and began writing songs remarkably young.

In a 2026 interview with SongwriterUniverse, she said she had been writing since she was about five or six years old. She also learned guitar when she was young and eventually began putting her own music online. 

But becoming a professional performer wasn't necessarily the obvious destination.

Lefty struggled with stage fright. She later told Bobby Bones that fear of performing caused her to hide some of her musical ambitions. Her path eventually took her from Chicago to New Orleans and Los Angeles, and for a period she viewed songwriting for other artists as a more comfortable possibility than becoming the person behind the microphone. 

That distinction is important.

Lefty didn't emerge because she had spent her entire life chasing celebrity. The songwriting came first.

She began releasing her own music

Lefty posted her first song online in 2021 and gradually began building a catalog.

Independent singles including “Stay” and “Kiss Me” followed, and in 2025 she released the EP Tragic, Really. 

The music she was making then wasn't identical to the country-pop direction listeners would later associate with her.

That evolution came naturally.

Lefty's influences include major country storytellers and singers. She has cited artists including Randy Travis, Keith Whitley, Brad Paisley and Tim McGraw among the country musicians who shaped her musical instincts. 

She has also spoken about her love for Taylor Swift, an artist whose ability to turn specific personal moments into universal songs provides an obvious reference point for a young songwriter like Lefty. Apple Music's artist programming has specifically featured Lefty discussing both “Boston” and that Swift influence. 

By late 2025 and early 2026, Lefty's sound and identity as a recording artist were becoming much clearer.

Then she went to Nashville.

A crush brought her to the piano

The beginning of “Boston” sounds almost too perfectly constructed for a romantic song.

It wasn't.

Lefty traveled to Nashville for a writing trip. There was also a guy there she liked.

She told Elite Daily that she had about 15 minutes before he was scheduled to pick her up. With time to kill, she sat down at a piano.

The chorus came.

Lefty recorded a snippet and posted it to TikTok without expecting much from it. 

The reaction changed the situation.

People latched onto the unfinished song and began asking her to complete it. Lefty later described to Bobby Bones how “Boston” essentially began taking off before it was even finished. 

For a songwriter accustomed to developing material before presenting a finished recording, that reversed the normal process.

The audience had already heard the seed.

Now she had to finish the song.

“Boston” began with a real feeling

The romantic uncertainty in “Boston” wasn't simply a songwriting exercise.

Lefty was writing about an actual crush.

The song captures the moment when someone who may normally be cautious about relationships realizes that another person is getting through those defenses.

The narrator knows she has reasons to run.

Instead, she finds herself considering the possibility that this relationship could be different.

That tension gives “Boston” much of its charm.

It isn't a grand declaration about eternal love. It captures the much earlier moment when someone realizes, perhaps reluctantly, that they're starting to care.

Lefty later confirmed that the inspiration was Vincent Mason, the country singer-songwriter who became her boyfriend. 

There is one amusing complication.

Mason isn't actually from Boston.

He's from the Atlanta area. 

So why Boston?

The city nevertheless had an unusual way of appearing around Lefty's life.

She told The Boston Globe that Boston had become a recurring thread in several circumstances. She had an upcoming performance at the city's House of Blues while opening for Cameron Whitcomb, and one of her Los Angeles friends was from Boston. 

Then there was the piano.

Lefty began writing the chorus while sitting at a piano without realizing something remarkable was right in front of her.

The word Boston was printed on the side of it.

She only noticed the coincidence later. 

It's the kind of detail that would sound too convenient if a screenwriter invented it.

But it fits the accidental nature of the entire song.

“Boston” wasn't created because someone decided Lefty needed a record named after a recognizable American city.

The pieces simply kept appearing.

Other writers helped finish the song

The final recording credits Stella Lefty, Grace Enger, Jacob Kasher Hindlin, Joe Reeves and Noah Kahan as songwriters. Reeves produced the recording, with Joe Harvey Whyte playing pedal steel guitar. 

Noah Kahan's songwriting credit has a specific explanation.

“Boston” contains an interpolation of Kahan's “Stick Season.” 

That connection makes musical sense.

Kahan's work frequently sits in the territory between folk, pop and singer-songwriter storytelling. “Boston” similarly avoids being confined to a single rigid genre.

Country instrumentation is present, particularly the pedal steel, but the song's melodic accessibility gives it a broader pop character.

That crossover wasn't necessarily calculated.

It reflects the mixture of music that shaped Lefty.

The unfinished version mattered

One of the most interesting things about “Boston” is that listeners encountered it while it was still becoming a song.

Social media often functions as advertising after a record is finished.

Here, it became part of the creative journey.

Lefty's early clip allowed people to react to an idea rather than a completed product. Their response demonstrated that something about the chorus was connecting before there was a fully produced recording to promote.

That created an unusual relationship between songwriter and audience.

Listeners weren't simply waiting for Lefty's next single.

They were waiting for her to finish the song they'd already decided they wanted. 

“Boston” arrived in March 2026

The completed “Boston” was released on March 27, 2026, with Apple Music listing it as a 2026 single and Shazam identifying Atlantic Outpost as the releasing label. 

By that point, Lefty's career was entering a dramatically different phase.

She had formed a band, begun performing more extensively and prepared for opportunities that once might have terrified the songwriter who struggled with stage fright. 

The song also became part of the musical direction surrounding her 2026 project Is This Heaven? Apple Music describes Lefty's rise around “Boston” as a moment when an artist who might once have seemed an unlikely country presence suddenly found herself strongly associated with the genre. 

Yet the most interesting part of the story happened before all of that.

Fifteen minutes changed everything

Strip away everything that happened after the release, and “Boston” remains a remarkably simple story.

A 23-year-old songwriter traveled to Nashville.

She liked a guy.

She had a few minutes before he arrived.

She sat at a piano.

And she started writing.

The guy eventually became her boyfriend. The unfinished song became a finished recording. And the songwriter who once wondered whether she wanted to perform her own material found herself building an audience around exactly that.

Sometimes songs begin with a grand concept.

“Boston” began because Stella Lefty had 15 minutes to spare before a date.

Discover more artists and songs on the CLE Radio Power 40.

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Taylor Swift was already one of the world's most recognizable songwriters when an animated cowgirl brought her back to where her recording career began.

“I Knew It, I Knew You,” released June 5, 2026, was written for Disney and Pixar's Toy Story 5. The song reunited Swift with longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff while reconnecting her with the country sound that introduced her to audiences two decades earlier.

But this wasn't simply an opportunity to make a country record again.

Swift found something personal in Jessie—the Toy Story character whose experiences with love, abandonment, memory and reunion had been unfolding since Toy Story 2.

For an artist whose career has been built around turning memories into songs, the connection made sense.

Taylor Swift began as a country songwriter

Taylor Alison Swift was born on December 13, 1989, in Pennsylvania.

Music became a serious pursuit while she was still a child. Her interest in country music eventually brought her family to the Nashville area, putting Swift closer to the industry she hoped to enter.

The move proved crucial.

Before stadium tours and pop albums, Swift learned her craft inside Nashville's songwriting culture.

She signed a publishing deal with Sony/ATV as a teenager and later joined the newly formed Big Machine Records. Her self-titled debut album arrived in 2006.

The songs established the formula that would remain important even as her sound changed: specific details, emotional memories and stories that made listeners feel as though they were reading someone's diary.

Swift eventually moved far beyond traditional country music, experimenting with mainstream pop, alternative textures, folk storytelling and electronic production.

Yet songwriting remained the center of everything.

That connection to Nashville endured strongly enough that in August 2026, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame announced Swift as part of its 2026 class. 

By then, she had traveled an extraordinary distance from her country beginnings.

“I Knew It, I Knew You” gave her a reason to return.

Taylor Swift was a Toy Story kid

The connection wasn't manufactured for a soundtrack assignment.

Swift has described herself as a Toy Story fan since she was about five years old.

When announcing “I Knew It, I Knew You,” she explained that creating a song for Jessie simultaneously felt new and familiar. Writing it, she said, felt like both a musical departure and a homecoming. 

That's an unusually appropriate description.

Swift was being asked to write from someone else's perspective, something she has done throughout her career. But the assignment also brought her back toward the country instrumentation and storytelling associated with her earliest records.

Most importantly, Jessie gave Swift a character worth writing about.

Jessie already had an emotional history

Jessie entered the franchise in 1999's Toy Story 2.

Her story contained one of the film's most emotional sequences.

Jessie had once belonged to a girl named Emily. As Emily grew older, the toy who had been loved and carried everywhere was gradually forgotten.

That abandonment shaped Jessie.

Swift understood it immediately.

Speaking about “I Knew It, I Knew You,” she pointed specifically to Jessie's history of heartbreak, loss and triumph. Swift said Toy Story 5 allowed audiences to see further development in Jessie as the character processed her experiences and memories. 

The songwriter also found something relatable in that journey.

This wasn't merely a song about a fictional cowgirl.

It was a song about what happens when time changes relationships.

An early screening sparked the song

Disney confirms that Swift wrote and produced “I Knew It, I Knew You” with Jack Antonoff, one of her most frequent creative partners. 

Swift's inspiration came after seeing the film before its theatrical release.

She explained in an ABC News interview that Jessie's story affected her deeply. Swift focused on the character's history and what it means to carry memories of someone after separation. 

That emotional foundation became the center of the song.

Rather than write a generic children's-movie anthem, Swift approached Jessie as she might approach a character in one of her own narrative songs.

She gave her a memory.

Then she explored what happens when the past unexpectedly returns.

“I Knew It, I Knew You” is about recognition

The song centers on reconnection.

Its narrator encounters someone who once mattered deeply after believing that part of life was over.

The reunion brings old feelings rushing back.

That makes the title particularly effective.

“I knew it” suggests realization.

“I knew you” suggests recognition.

Together, they capture the strange sensation of seeing someone after years apart and discovering that time hasn't completely erased what once existed.

Swift's comments make clear that Jessie's emotional history was central to the writing. The songwriter remembered the character experiencing the pain of watching someone leave and used that history to inform the new song. 

Memory, therefore, isn't just nostalgia in the recording.

It's evidence that something mattered.

The music returns Swift to country

The song also stands apart because of its sound.

Disney described “I Knew It, I Knew You” as a return to Swift's country roots, blending musical styles associated with different periods of her career. 

The arrangement emphasizes Swift's voice rather than burying it beneath massive production.

Country-oriented instrumentation and acoustic textures reinforce the connection to Jessie while simultaneously recalling the musical world where Swift began.

That's what makes her description of the recording as “coming home” especially fitting.

This wasn't Taylor Swift pretending the previous two decades hadn't happened.

It was an adult songwriter revisiting a musical language she first learned as a teenager.

Jack Antonoff helped bridge the eras

Antonoff was an especially interesting choice for the project.

His work with Swift stretches across many of her stylistic transformations. Together, they've created sleek pop, atmospheric electronic music, intimate storytelling and sprawling conceptual records.

For “I Knew It, I Knew You,” their task was different.

The production needed to serve a Pixar character while still sounding recognizably like Taylor Swift.

The result connects the Nashville songwriter she once was with the artist she became.

Disney and Pixar director and screenwriter Andrew Stanton praised Swift's immediate understanding of Jessie, saying her connection to the character was unmistakable. He felt the finished song was so closely connected to Toy Story that it seemed as though it had always belonged in that world. 

That's significant praise for any soundtrack song.

It means the music isn't simply attached to the movie.

It's part of the storytelling.

The release included alternate versions

“I Knew It, I Knew You” was released on June 5, 2026, two weeks before Toy Story 5 reached theaters on June 19. It was also included on the film's soundtrack. 

The release was accompanied by several physical editions.

Disney announced three exclusive CD versions featuring the recording as heard in the movie along with special acoustic and piano versions featuring different vocals and production. 

Those alternatives were particularly appropriate for a song representing Swift's return toward her musical roots.

Strip away the production and the essential elements remain familiar:

A character.

A memory.

A relationship.

And a songwriter trying to understand what those things mean.

A Taylor Swift song hiding inside a Jessie song

“I Knew It, I Knew You” was written specifically for Toy Story 5, and Swift has been clear about Jessie being its inspiration.

There is no need to invent an autobiographical explanation beyond what Swift herself has said.

The interesting connection is already there.

Jessie is a character shaped by memory.

Taylor Swift is a songwriter whose career has repeatedly demonstrated the power of remembering details.

Both understand that something can disappear from your everyday life without disappearing from you completely.

That made them unusually compatible.

Twenty years after Swift's first album introduced a teenage country songwriter, Jessie gave the adult version of that songwriter a reason to pick up that musical thread again.

The result was both something new and something familiar.

Just as Swift described it, “I Knew It, I Knew You” was a departure.

And a homecoming.

Discover more artists and songs on the CLE Radio Power 40. 

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By the time Ariana Grande released “Hate That I Made You Love Me” in May 2026, she had already lived several careers in public.

She had been a child performer, Broadway actress, Nickelodeon star, pop phenomenon and movie musical lead. She had also spent much of her adult life navigating fame while increasingly using music to process love, loss, memory and the complicated relationship between a public figure and the people watching her.

“Hate That I Made You Love Me” arrived at an interesting point in that evolution.

Instead of relying primarily on Grande's extraordinary vocal power, the song presents something more restrained and vulnerable. It also reunited her with two collaborators who have played major roles in shaping her music: Max Martin and ILYA.

Ariana Grande started performing young

Ariana Grande-Butera was born on June 26, 1993, in Boca Raton, Florida. Music entered her life early.

The Recording Academy notes an extraordinary moment from her childhood: Gloria Estefan noticed Grande singing aboard a cruise ship when Grande was only eight years old. 

Grande's ambitions soon extended to professional theater.

In 2008, she joined the Broadway musical 13. Television then introduced her to a much larger audience when she played Cat Valentine on Nickelodeon's Victorious and later Sam & Cat.

But music was always waiting.

Grande's debut album, Yours Truly, arrived in 2013. “The Way,” featuring Mac Miller, became an early breakthrough and established that the former television actress possessed a voice capable of supporting a serious recording career. 

Her second album, My Everything, followed in 2014.

That period also introduced collaborators who would become enormously important to her future work.

Max Martin and ILYA became key collaborators

Grande's transition into global pop coincided with her work with Swedish producers and songwriters Max Martin and ILYA.

ILYA worked closely with Grande during the My Everything era, including on “Problem,” and continued collaborating with her across subsequent projects. 

Martin's influence reaches across decades of pop music, but his partnership with Grande became especially important because her records needed to balance two very different strengths.

Grande could deliver enormous vocals.

But her most effective pop songs didn't always need to demonstrate everything she could technically do.

Over time, her music increasingly used restraint, stacked harmonies and intimate vocal textures alongside the bigger performances audiences already associated with her.

That evolution became even more apparent as Grande's songwriting grew more personal.

Grande's music became more introspective

Grande's career changed dramatically during the late 2010s.

Her music increasingly addressed grief, relationships, independence and emotional recovery. Projects such as Sweetener and Thank U, Next blurred the boundary between pop songwriting and personal reflection.

By Eternal Sunshine in 2024, Grande was exploring memory and relationships through an album inspired partly by the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

She extended that world in 2025 with Eternal Sunshine Deluxe: Brighter Days Ahead, which added six new songs, including “Twilight Zone,” “Warm,” “Dandelion,” “Past Life” and “Hampstead.” 

Grande also co-directed the Brighter Days Ahead short film with Christian Breslauer.

The film revisited memories both painful and cherished and dealt with themes including fame, personal scrutiny, generational trauma, healing and the desire to reconnect with one's earlier self. 

It effectively closed the Eternal Sunshine chapter.

Grande was ready for another one.

“Hate That I Made You Love Me” introduced Petal

Grande announced “Hate That I Made You Love Me” in May 2026 as the first song from her eighth studio album, Petal.

The single was released on May 29, 2026, through Grande's BabyDoll Music imprint under exclusive license to Republic Records. Apple Music and Spotify both confirm the May 29 release. 

The song's creative team was especially significant.

Grande co-wrote and co-produced the recording with Max Martin and ILYA, bringing together three people with a long history of creating music together. 

When Grande announced the song, she described it as “one of my favorite songs I'll ever write” and called Martin and ILYA favorite collaborators and people especially dear to her. 

That makes the recording more than simply another collaboration assembled for a pop release.

It comes from a creative partnership stretching back more than a decade.

The song turns inward

“Hate That I Made You Love Me” is built around emotional contradiction.

The title itself contains one.

Love would normally be treated as something desirable. Here, Grande frames being loved as something capable of producing guilt and regret.

The song explores vulnerability, emotional responsibility and the uncomfortable realization that another person's feelings can become painful when you can no longer return them in the same way.

People characterized the song as vulnerable and introspective, highlighting both its subdued vocal approach and themes involving public perception and emotional exposure. 

That restraint matters.

Grande has one of contemporary pop's most recognizable voices. A song like this could easily have been constructed around huge vocal moments.

Instead, intimacy carries much of the emotional weight.

The result fits naturally into the increasingly reflective songwriting that marked the years leading into Petal.

Petal represented growth after difficulty

The album surrounding the song provided additional context.

Grande described Petal through the image of something living that manages to grow through a difficult environment—something “full of life and growing through the cracks of something cold and hard and challenging.” 

That image helps explain why “Hate That I Made You Love Me” works as an introduction.

The song isn't about arriving at a simple happy ending.

It sits inside conflicting emotions.

There is affection, but also regret.

There is vulnerability, but also distance.

There is an awareness that relationships can leave both people changed even when they cannot continue in the form they once had.

That ambiguity is more interesting than a straightforward breakup song.

The visual presentation continued the story

Grande initially released a comic book-inspired lyric video alongside the song. 

A full music video followed, featuring actor Justin Long. 

The rollout also included alternate versions of the recording.

By late June, an expanded release offered a live-from-rehearsal performance, a “melody pass” version, a lyric draft recorded from bed and an a cappella version. 

Those versions provide an unusually revealing look at a pop song beyond its polished master recording.

For a performer famous for vocal precision, hearing sketches and alternate approaches helps emphasize that a finished Ariana Grande record begins as a songwriting process rather than simply a vocal showcase.

A new chapter built on an old partnership

“Hate That I Made You Love Me” arrived more than a decade after Grande first began working with Max Martin and ILYA.

A great deal changed during those years.

Grande moved from television fame into pop superstardom. Her music became more personal. Acting returned to the center of her career through Wicked. Her songwriting increasingly examined memory, relationships and the consequences of living so much of one's life in public.

Yet when it was time to introduce Petal, Grande returned to two collaborators who had been there during an earlier transformation.

That history gives “Hate That I Made You Love Me” another layer.

It sounds like an artist beginning again without abandoning everything that came before.

The voice is unmistakably Ariana Grande.

But the vulnerability, restraint and emotional uncertainty reveal how far the person using that voice had traveled by the time the song was released.

Discover more artists and songs on the CLE Radio Power 40.

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Long before Ella Langley recorded “Choosin’ Texas,” she was a teenager from rural Alabama with a big voice, a love of storytelling and an ambition that stretched far beyond the bars where she first performed.

Her path eventually led to Nashville, a debut album and a friendship with one of the artists who had influenced her years earlier: Miranda Lambert.

That relationship would help produce “Choosin’ Texas,” a song whose inspiration began with one of the strangest traffic-stop stories imaginable.

It involved Lambert, a dog, a police officer—and a kangaroo.

Ella Langley grew up around stories and songs

Langley comes from Hope Hull, Alabama, where music and storytelling were part of family life.

She told the Recording Academy that her father and grandfather were gifted storytellers. Family dinners could become loud gatherings where everyone talked, laughed and repeated familiar stories for whoever happened to be sitting at the table. 

Langley was also singing constantly as a child.

Two of the earliest songs she remembers learning were “Amazing Grace” and the traditional folk song “Froggy Went a-Courtin’.” Years later, that childhood connection remained important enough for her to revisit “Froggy Went a-Courtin’” while creating her Dandelion album. 

But knowing she wanted to sing wasn't the same as knowing how to build a career.

At 18, Langley was playing cover sets in bars and performing around Alabama and the Southeast. In 2019, she moved to Nashville. 

There she encountered another challenge.

She needed to become a songwriter.

The pandemic changed her direction

Langley has said melodies came naturally to her, but she initially struggled to finish complete songs.

Then COVID-19 shut down live music about six months after she arrived in Nashville.

The timing could hardly have been worse for someone paying her bills through live performances.

Instead, the shutdown became an unexpected songwriting education.

Unable to continue her normal schedule of gigs, Langley spent her time writing. She has described the period as a blessing in disguise because it forced her to develop that part of her craft. 

Her songwriting became intensely personal.

Rather than constructing an artificial country persona, Langley wrote about the confusion, relationships and mistakes of her early twenties. She has compared many of those songs to journal entries. 

That straightforward approach became central to her music.

“You Look Like You Love Me” proved she could trust herself

Langley released the EP Excuse the Mess in 2023, followed by her debut album, hungover, in August 2024. She co-wrote every song on the 14-track album. 

One recording proved particularly important.

“You Look Like You Love Me,” featuring fellow Alabama singer Riley Green, included spoken verses that gave the song an old-fashioned, almost cinematic quality.

Langley told Rolling Stone that her label initially wanted those sections sung.

She refused.

Langley later said the song's success created a new level of trust between her and the people around her. 

That stubbornness would serve her well.

By the time she began creating the music that followed hungover, Langley had learned that some of her best ideas were the ones that didn't necessarily follow the expected formula.

Then came a writing retreat with Miranda Lambert.

Miranda Lambert had been important to Langley for years

Lambert wasn't simply another famous songwriter Langley happened to meet in Nashville.

Her music had mattered to Langley long before they worked together.

Langley has revealed that her family lost their house to the bank shortly after her 14th birthday. Around that difficult period, she heard Lambert's “The House That Built Me.”

The song hit hard.

Langley felt as though Lambert was singing about her own life. 

Years later, the two women developed a creative relationship.

That makes what happened during the “Choosin’ Texas” writing session particularly meaningful.

The teenager who once found comfort in a Miranda Lambert record was now sitting in a room writing a song with her.

A kangaroo helped inspire “Choosin’ Texas”

“Choosin’ Texas” was written by Ella Langley, Miranda Lambert, Luke Dick and Joybeth Taylor during a writers retreat. 

And the idea emerged from a wonderfully bizarre story.

Langley had heard about Lambert once being pulled over while traveling with unusual passengers.

Accounts of the story vary slightly in the number of dogs involved, but one detail remains wonderfully consistent:

There was a kangaroo in the vehicle.

Langley asked Lambert about the incident during the retreat.

As she imagined the police officer encountering this unmistakably Texan scene, a thought occurred to her: the officer must have known immediately that Lambert was from Texas.

That idea helped produce the phrase at the heart of “Choosin’ Texas.” 

It was funny.

But the song they built around it wasn't really about kangaroos or traffic stops.

It was about wanting someone who ultimately wants something—or someone—else.

The song is about being the second choice

“Choosin’ Texas” tells the story of a woman watching a man gravitate toward another woman whose Texas identity seems impossible to compete with.

Langley is left alone, nursing the disappointment.

The Texas imagery gives the record personality, but underneath it is a much more universal emotion: wanting something that doesn't choose you back.

Langley explained that the feeling doesn't have to involve romance. Someone can experience it with a relationship, a career opportunity or virtually anything they've invested their heart in. 

That observation is crucial to understanding the song.

“Choosin’ Texas” may contain cowboy imagery and Southern references, but the emotional story is much broader.

It's about rejection.

More specifically, it's about realizing that wanting something badly doesn't mean you get to keep it.

The production stays unmistakably country

“Choosin’ Texas” was released in October 2025 and later became part of Langley's second album, Dandelion. 

Musically, the song doesn't attempt to disguise its country identity.

Rolling Stone has highlighted its use of steel guitar and mandolin, elements that reinforce the record's traditional character even as the melody remains immediately accessible. 

That balance fits Langley.

Her music can incorporate rock energy and pop instincts, but she has repeatedly demonstrated an affection for older country traditions.

Her influences also stretch beyond country.

Langley has named Stevie Nicks as her biggest influence, particularly admiring the symbolism Nicks uses in songwriting. 

That helps explain why apparently simple details matter in a Langley song.

A drink isn't necessarily just a drink.

Texas isn't necessarily just Texas.

The image can carry the emotion.

The video brought the story to life

“Choosin’ Texas” also received an ambitious official music video.

The video features Miranda Lambert, giving the song's co-writer a visible place in the world she helped create.

Actors Luke Grimes and Ava Phillippe also appear. 

Including Lambert feels particularly appropriate.

Her Texas story helped spark the song.

Her earlier music helped Langley through a painful period as a teenager.

And by the time “Choosin’ Texas” arrived, Lambert had become both collaborator and mentor.

Their relationship would continue into Dandelion, with Lambert helping co-produce the album alongside Langley and Ben West. The two also recorded “Butterfly Season” together. 

A song built from a real relationship

The best part of the “Choosin’ Texas” story may be how many pieces of Ella Langley's life eventually came together inside one song.

There is Alabama, where she learned about storytelling.

There is Nashville, where she learned how to turn those stories into songs.

There is Miranda Lambert, whose music meant something to Langley before the two women ever met.

And then there is that ridiculous kangaroo story—the kind of detail no songwriting committee could manufacture as convincingly as real life.

From that unlikely beginning, Langley and her co-writers found something much more human.

Sometimes you can give something your heart and still watch it choose another direction.

That's the real story behind “Choosin’ Texas.”

Discover more artists and songs on the CLE Radio Power 40.

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CLE Radio is an independent online radio station and entertainment platform based in Cleveland, Ohio—the "Home of Rock & Roll." Moving beyond the constraints of traditional radio formats, the platform centers on the philosophy that "great music deserves to be heard," regardless of its release date or genre. The station distinguishes itself through a multi-faceted approach that integrates music discovery, community engagement via "The Land," and interactive listener participation through the "CLE Radio Hotline."

Key takeaways include:

A Non-Linear Music Strategy: Blending "yesterday, today, and tomorrow" to provide variety over predictable playlists.

Community-Driven Content: Utilizing "The Land" as a hub for Northeast Ohio events and business promotions.

Active Listener Participation: Empowering audiences to influence rotation through play-based voting and direct feedback channels.

Strategic Growth for Creators: Providing clear pathways for independent artists and show creators to submit original work.

Flexible Advertising Models: Offering high-frequency radio spots with the ability to rotate messaging multiple times per month.

Core Philosophy: Music and Identity

CLE Radio is built on the premise that music in Cleveland is not "background noise" but a fundamental part of the city's identity. The platform rejects the "narrow boxes" of traditional radio, which often prioritize specific decades or demographics at the expense of variety.

The "Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow" Approach

The station’s programming is defined by its lack of temporal boundaries:

Music from Yesterday: Reviving forgotten tracks and established classics.

Music from Today: Featuring current hits and trending tracks.

Music from Tomorrow: Introducing emerging artists who have yet to achieve mainstream recognition.

The unifying standard for airplay is qualitative rather than chronological, aiming to deliver "variety with personality."

Strategic Pillars of the Platform

CLE Radio functions as an ecosystem comprised of several distinct but interconnected components designed to engage listeners, artists, and local businesses.

1. The Land: Local Connectivity

"The Land" serves as the station's community destination, specifically focused on Greater Cleveland and Northeast Ohio. It acts as a bridge between the audience and regional institutions.

Affiliated Venues: The platform integrates information from major entities including the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Playhouse Square, Rocket Arena, House of Blues Cleveland, Blossom Music Center, and the Agora.

Participation Model: Unlike traditional directories, "The Land" encourages businesses and venues to post their own updates, ranging from concert announcements and restaurant specials to community activities.

2. Music Discovery and the Power 40

The platform incentivizes active rather than passive listening through two primary features:

New Music & Battle of the Bands: Emerging artists are featured in a dedicated section where every "qualifying play" counts as a vote. High listener engagement can lead to an artist being moved into regular rotation.

The CLE Radio Power 40: A weekly ranking based on national radio activity and streaming data. This interactive chart allows listeners to track song movement, watch videos, and explore artist backgrounds.

3. Original Programming and Conversation

Beyond music, CLE Radio produces podcasts and audio programming that address cultural and societal questions.

Topical Breadth: Discussions cover technology, money, relationships, artificial intelligence, and family.

The CLE Radio Hotline: A dedicated channel ("Our Conversation. Your Voice.") where listeners can leave feedback, stories, or disagreements. Selected messages are integrated into future programming, making the audience a part of the broadcast.

Opportunities for Artists and Creators

CLE Radio positions itself as an entry point for independent talent who may be overlooked by major labels or traditional radio algorithms.

Opportunity
Description
Goal
Submit a Song | Independent artists can submit tracks for airplay consideration. | To bypass traditional barriers and offer "an opportunity to be heard."
Submit a Show | Creators can pitch original talk or music programs. | To foster independent voices and diverse audio concepts.

Business and Advertising Infrastructure

The platform provides a dual-channel advertising approach combining digital and radio placements.

Radio Advertising Program

The current radio advertising structure is designed for high frequency and flexibility:

Frequency: 250 airings of a 30-second commercial per month.

Flexibility: Businesses are permitted to change their commercial creative up to four times per month. This allows for time-sensitive promotions, such as rotating restaurant specials or event-specific ads.

Digital Advertising

Digital options allow organizations to reach the community through the CLE Radio website and the "The Land" section, targeting an audience that is actively seeking local engagement.

Global Reach with Local Identity

While the station’s identity is rooted in Cleveland, its digital nature allows for a global footprint. The platform operates on the principle of "Local roots. Global reach." Using the internet as a transmitter, CLE Radio exports Cleveland's "Home of Rock & Roll" personality to a worldwide audience, ranging from Northeast Ohio to international listeners in locations like London or Los Angeles.

Conclusion

CLE Radio is not merely an automated playlist; it is an evolving music and entertainment platform. By combining the heritage of Cleveland’s music scene with modern interactive technology, it creates a space where discovery, conversation, and community participation are central to the listener experience.

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