It's June 1, and Ella's Got the Inside Track on Song of the Summer

So here we are — it's June 1, the unofficial start of summer, and the song-of-the-summer talk is officially in season. We've spent the last few weeks tracking Ella's chart run one milestone at a time, but stepping back this morning, the bigger picture is hard to miss: she's walking into June with about as good a position as anyone could hope for.

The case is pretty simple. Billboard laid it out in a five-questions piece on her summer chances, and the short version is that she's been holding the top two spots on the Hot 100 at the same time — "Choosin' Texas" up top and "Be Her" right behind it — with a third song hanging around just outside the top ten. That's not the kind of thing that happens by accident, and it's the sort of head start that usually decides this race before the fireworks even go off.

What we keep coming back to is that these are two pretty different songs doing the heavy lifting. "Choosin' Texas" is the one that's been impossible to dislodge all year, but "Be Her" is the one a lot of people now think could become the song people actually associate with the season — it's newer, it's still climbing, and it just grabbed the radio crown. A summer song tends to be whatever's blasting out of truck windows in August, and "Be Her" has that feel.

She's not running unopposed, of course. The Spotify predictions list had Ella in the mix alongside some big pop names, so this isn't a coronation. But when you stack it all up — the records she's already piled up this year, the tour rolling through stadiums all summer, two songs already parked at the top — it's hard to bet against her.

So that's what we're watching as June gets going. Our money's on "Be Her" being the one that sticks, but honestly, we'd be happy to be wrong if it means "Choosin' Texas" somehow hangs on into August. Either way, it's shaping up to be a good summer to be an Ella fan.