Ella Made an Apple Music Summer Playlist, and It's a Peek at What Shaped Dandelion
Ella curated a Dandelion Summer playlist for Apple Music's Summertime Sounds, and the picks double as a window into the records that inspired her album.
We spend most of these posts counting chart positions and mapping out tour routing, so this one's a nice change of pace: Ella has put together her own summer playlist, and it tells you more about her than any chart number does.
Apple Music brought back its Summertime Sounds series for 2026, the run of artist-curated playlists it rolls out every June, and Ella is one of the country names on the bill this year alongside Riley Green. Her entry is called Dandelion Summer, and it's more than forty songs deep — part her own record, part the music she leans on before she walks out on stage.
What's actually on it
The fun part is the company her songs keep. Tucked in around tracks from Dandelion are cuts from Fleetwood Mac, the Bee Gees and Eric Church — the kind of names that, once you hear them, make a lot of the album click into place. Country Insider notes those picks aren't random filler; they're records that inspired Dandelion and live on Ella's actual pre-show playlist. So this is closer to a backstage pass than a marketing drop. If you've ever wondered what's in her ears in the last ten minutes before the lights go down, this is about as close as we're going to get.
It also lines up neatly with where her head's been. A record she's described as being about growth and resilience, built by someone who clearly grew up on classic-rock harmonies as much as on country radio — you can hear all of that sitting in one playlist.
Why it's worth a listen this week
The timing is good. With her summer calendar about to get loaded — her own Dandelion headline run plus the stadium nights — Dandelion Summer is basically the pre-game soundtrack for all of it. Throw it on in the truck, get a feel for the influences, and you'll hear the live shows a little differently when you get to one. You can find the dates we're tracking over on our tour page, and if you want the bigger picture on her year, our song-of-the-summer rundown is a good place to start.
Either way, it's a low-stakes, high-reward forty minutes-plus. Press play and let Ella DJ your June.