Ella Langley Answers Critics in Emotional Columbus Speech
At her Columbus show, Ella Langley faced the online criticism head-on and told the crowd she is proud of the girl everybody keeps picking on. Here is what she said.
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Ella Langley has spent the last year letting her songs do most of the talking. At her Columbus, Ohio show this week she set the guitar aside for a minute and answered her critics to their faces, and the clip has been making the rounds across country media since.
"More opinions on myself than I've ever had"
Between songs, Langley told the crowd that this level of scrutiny caught her off guard. "I don't think I've ever had more opinions on myself in my life than I have in this last year," she said, per Whiskey Riff. She ran down the list of what people pick apart, "the way I look. The way I speak. The way I dress. The way I move. The way I sing. The way I write," and admitted it got under her skin. As Country Now reported, she even copped to a moment of real doubt: "I don't know if I'm strong enough for this, Lord."
We've watched her turn the stage into this kind of confessional before, most recently in her gas station taquitos speech, and going back to the viral stage speeches about the pressure of the spotlight this summer. This one landed harder because she named the thing head-on.
"I'm proud of that girl"
Then she flipped it. When the noise gets loud, Langley said she pictures the younger version of herself, the one grinding through night drives in a 15-passenger van and a Honda Accord to reach rooms like this one. "I am proud of that girl that everybody seems to be picking on a little bit," she told the room, a line Holler used to connect the moment to the wave of online backlash she has been weathering.
Why it hit this week
The timing is the tell. This came as "Choosin' Texas" keeps rewriting the record books, and the bigger the song gets, the louder the peanut gallery. Watching her answer it from the stage, on her own terms instead of in a Notes-app statement, felt like the most Ella Langley response possible.
She still has a stretch of the Dandelion Tour left this fall. If Columbus is any sign, showing up early for the between-song talk is the move.
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