Ella Langley Earns a Dove Awards Nod for 'Speaking Terms'

Here's one we did not have on the summer bingo card: Ella Langley is a Dove Awards nominee. When the Gospel Music Association announced the nominees for the 57th Annual GMA Dove Awards this week, "Speaking Terms" showed up in the Country/Roots Song of the Year category — which means the quietest, most personal song on Dandelion just earned Ella recognition from the gospel music world, a lane she has never competed in before.

MusicRow and Billboard both carried the full nominee list, and Parade picked up the Ella angle Thursday morning. The ceremony happens October 6 at Bridgestone Arena in Nashville, with eight-time Dove winner Tauren Wells hosting for his fourth straight year.

A country record in a gospel room

The Dove Awards are Christian and gospel music's biggest night, and the Country/Roots Song of the Year category is where the two worlds overlap. This year the overall field is led by Phil Wickham with nine nominations and CeCe Winans with seven — heavyweight gospel company for a woman whose biggest hit is about choosing a state over a man.

That's exactly what makes this nomination interesting to us. Ella didn't record a gospel record. She recorded a song about the distance between herself and God — the doubt, the silence, the feeling of not being on speaking terms — and the gospel world heard it as honest enough to nominate anyway. That says a lot about the song.

Why "Speaking Terms" hit different

"Speaking Terms" has always been the odd one out on Dandelion, and Ella has said so herself. In a TikTok Live quoted by Parade, she explained it's the only outside cut she has ever released — a song written by someone else that was originally on hold for another artist — and that a moment during an Uber ride felt like a sign she was supposed to record it. "I never felt worthy of that song," she said. "I thought it was a special one. My relationship with my faith was very different from what it looks like now."

For a catalog built almost entirely on her own pen, letting an outside song through the door meant it had to matter. On the charts it did respectable, not record-breaking, numbers — a No. 63 debut on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 22 on Hot Country Songs, per Parade. But awards voters clearly heard past the peak position.

The company she's keeping

The Country/Roots Song of the Year field is stacked with artists who live at the faith-and-country intersection full time: "Black Sheep" by Ben Fuller, "Broken Man Can" by Scotty Inman, "Still Do" by Anne Wilson with Cole Swindell, and "The Jesus I Know Now" by Brandon Lake with Lainey Wilson. Ella is the only nominee in the category coming off a mainstream country No. 1 — and given the run "Choosin' Texas" has been on (full story on the song page), she may be the name in the category most voters' kids know.

What's next

The Doves hand out trophies October 6 in Nashville. Between now and then, the Dandelion Tour keeps rolling — she plays CMAC in Canandaigua tonight, then heads to Texas in mid-August starting with the Austin stop at Moody Center. The full remaining tour schedule is here, and if tonight's your show, the amphitheater lawn look covers what to wear at CMAC.

Add it to the pile: a Hot 100 record, a climbing radio single, and now a nod from a genre she wasn't even aiming at. Not a bad week.