Halfway through her very sold-out concert Tuesday night at the Greek Theatre, Ella Langley pulled up a stool near the front of the stage and told us she wanted to \u201cbe kind of normal for a second, if that\u2019s all right witcha.\u201d<\/p>\n
Life has been pretty un-normal lately for the 27-year-old country singer from small-town Alabama, whose smash \u201cChoosin\u2019 Texas\u201d set a new record<\/a> last month for the longest stay of all time atop Billboard\u2019s Hot 100. The chart achievement only bolstered talk that Langley is due to clean up when Grammy Award nominations are announced next month \u2014 welcome chatter, no doubt, for a striver who grew up, as she said at the Greek, determined to get exactly where she\u2019s gotten.<\/p>\n Yet Langley\u2019s success has brought with it some darkness, including accusations from armchair experts on social media that \u201cChoosin\u2019 Texas\u201d \u2014 a monster hit that people keep saying they\u2019ve never heard \u2014 owes its impressive stats to an act of record-biz chicanery. More ominously, Langley called off a concert in Oklahoma last week due to what she called a \u201cserious security threat.\u201d<\/p>\n Then former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem got involved in Langley\u2019s business when she tried in a tweet to pit the singer against Kacey Musgraves<\/a> after Musgraves hosted the Senate hopeful James Talarico at a show in Dallas. (Langley, who\u2019s been circumspect about voicing her political opinions, appeared to un-tag herself from Noem\u2019s post, which is objectively hilarious.)<\/p>\n So you could empathize with Langley \u2014 empathize more than with other country singers longing for the good ol\u2019 days \u2014 as she straightened up on that stool to do \u201cSomethin\u2019 Simple,\u201d a winsome ditty from this year\u2019s double-platinum \u201cDandelion\u201d LP. \u201cWhile I\u2019m living the dream,\u201d she sang, \u201call I\u2019m dreaming about is slowing down just a little.\u201d<\/p>\n This acoustic section of Tuesday\u2019s gig, the first of two at the Greek, was by far the best part of the night; Langley also brought out her two openers for a pair of stripped-down duets in \u201cDreams,\u201d the deathless Fleetwood Mac classic, which she sang with Laci Kaye Booth<\/a>, and \u201cStrangers,\u201d her soulful power ballad with Kameron Marlowe, who gladly disregarded that unspoken rule about not showing up the headliner who hired you.<\/p>\n Loose, chatty, surrounded by friends and bandmates, Langley here was just a musician playing music; I can\u2019t say whether she attained the normalcy she said she was looking for, though I\u2019d buy that this is more or less what she gets up to on the back porch she sings about missing in \u201cSomethin\u2019 Simple.\u201d<\/p>\n The problem with the rest of the concert \u2014 the parts with the lights and the videos and the goofy stage business involving a guy with a keytar and a cigarette \u2014 was that it demanded a level of star power that Langley simply doesn\u2019t possess (or anyway isn\u2019t interested in deploying).<\/p>\n On record, she summons a coolly detached quality that plays intriguingly against arrangements lush with romantic pedal steel; there\u2019s something hard to pin down about the emotion of tunes like \u201cBe Her\u201d and \u201cChoosin\u2019 Texas,\u201d in which the narrator sounds almost alienated from her own heartbreak.<\/p>\n