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Aspiring Nashville artists and songwriters are often met with some variation of the same advice: “Must be present to win.” It means that showing up consistently could only accelerate their chances of building a long-lasting, hit-filled career. That adage was key to songwriter JoyBeth Taylor’s newest Billboard Country Airplay No. 1, the Ella Langley and Morgan Wallen duet “I Can’t Love You Anymore.”
“Ella and Morgan had been trying to write a duet,” she shares. “It was two weeks after my son was born and I got a call about 7:30 at night. Ella asked, ‘Can you come to the studio?’ My baby had just been born and I was going through it and my husband was like, ‘You need to go write a song.’ So I showed up and [Langley and co-writer Austin Goodloe] had the ‘I can’t love you anymore’ part already and we just finished it out. We weren’t sure where it was going to land or what was going to happen after that, but it ended up being perfect. I’m so grateful that I showed up that day.”
Taylor currently ranks at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Country Songwriters chart and at No. 6 on the all-genre Hot 100 Songwriters chart — positions that are driven by a double shot of hits. There’s “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” as well as Langley’s record-breaking, 17-week Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper “Choosin’ Texas,” which Taylor wrote with Langley, Miranda Lambert and Luke Dick during a writers’ retreat just outside of Nashville.
“It was the first time I had ever written with Miranda. We wrote ‘Butterfly Season’ on the same day as ‘Choosin’ Texas.’ When Ella said that line, ‘She’s from Texas I can tell,’ that sparked the whole thing,” she says.
In addition to the song’s Hot 100 run, “Choosin’ Texas” topped the Country Airplay chart for three weeks, and rules the Hot Country Songs chart for a 35th week, becoming the third longest-leading No. 1 on that chart behind the Florida Georgia Line and Bebe Rexha collab “Meant to Be” (50 weeks) and Shaboozey’s “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” (45 weeks). The song’s staying power on multiple charts has led many to question why this song in particular has had so much staying power.
“I actually asked [Ella] that last week, like ‘Why this song?’” Taylor says. “And I don’t know. Maybe the melody, it just feels familiar. I think when things feel familiar, people tend to gravitate towards them … Melody is such a big thing to Ella; she’s so great with melodies. She’s great with lyrics too, but is just awesome with melodies and she’s very nitpicky about having to get the melody right.”
Taylor and Langley’s fruitful creative partnership predates their current success. Taylor co-wrote six songs on Langley’s 2024 debut album Hungover, another three on Hungover’s deluxe version and a dozen songs on Langley’s 2026 sophomore project Dandelion. Beyond “Choosin’ Texas” and “I Can’t Love You Anymore,” Taylor co-wrote the Country Airplay No. 2 hit “Weren’t For The Wind,” “Dandelion” and the Koe Wetzel collaboration “That’s Why We Fight.” Another Langley co-write, “Speaking Terms,” earned Langley her first GMA Dove Awards nomination leading into the upcoming awards ceremony.
That sustained streak of hit songwriting success has the potential to place Langley and Taylor within the lineage of other successful artist-writer powerhouse pairings, such as Dean Dillon furnishing over 60 compositions for George Strait, Liz Rose’s considerable contributions to Taylor Swift’s early music, Hillary Lindsey writing numerous hits recorded by Carrie Underwood and Brad Paisley’s many hits with co-writers including Chris DuBois and Lee Thomas Miller.
In addition to her work with Langley, Taylor has also co-written Corey Kent’s current top 40 Country Airplay single “Empty Words” and his “Something’s Gonna Kill Me,” as well as Gavin Adcock’s “Never Call Again,” Erin Kinsey’s “Trouble,” Kameron Marlowe’s “Let The Lonely” and Chase Matthews’s “Autopilot,” among others.
Growing up in Alabama, Taylor was immersed in the music of The Eagles, Alanis Morrissette, Patsy Cline and Willie Nelson. “I memorized the whole Patsy Cline Greatest Hits record from front to back,” she says.
By age 4, Taylor started writing poetry and later began writing her own lyrics to karaoke tracks. “I couldn’t play guitar and didn’t know how to write music, so I just started writing my own lyrics to other people’s music … I remember there was a lot of Taylor Swift and John Mayer at the time. I learned guitar at about 14, while doing missions trips with my uncle. Once I learned guitar, I started writing full songs and knew I wanted to move to Nashville.”
She made that journey to Nashville a decade ago, and quickly took inspiration from albums by songwriters like Travis Meadows, Tony Lane and Natalie Hemby. “I started diving into their stuff and I feel like that’s when I honed my craft as a songwriter, when I began studying the people that came before me and dissecting their songs,” she says.
Those first years in Nashville, she played popular songwriter hotspots like the Bluebird Cafe, the Commodore and at open mic nights around the city. Initially, Taylor harbored hopes of being an artist, because she had assumed every songwriter had ambitions to a similar path.
In 2019, she connected with a group of writers that included a fellow Alabama native: Langley. Taylor and Langley had first met briefly when Taylor played a writers’ round at Nashville’s Belcourt Theatre and saw each other again months later when a mutual friend invited Taylor to take part in an online writers’ round.
“I went to his house and he was living with Ella at the time. We got to hang out, smoked a whole pack of Marlboro Reds and talked about life,” Taylor recalls. “We just hit it off and didn’t stop hanging out. We connected a lot on growing up and having similar childhoods, being from Alabama.”
Taylor and Langley co-wrote their first song together in 2020 and became a key part of Langley’s writing team, also contributing to Langley’s 2023 EP, Excuse the Mess. In 2021, Taylor signed with Kent Earls and Kane Brown’s Verse 2 and with Sony Music Publishing Nashville.
Having two massive hit songs, as well as a strong body of work for various artists, has “definitely opened up doors that might not have been open beforehand,” Taylor says, noting that she’s soon making her first trip to Los Angeles for meetings and writing sessions.
“I’d love to write some pop stuff and get into that world if that’s an opportunity that comes up,” she says, calling P!nk her “dream artist of forever. Her songs are amazing, she’s somebody I look up to a lot. I think that would be really cool.”
In the space of a decade, Taylor has risen from aspiring writer to an essential driver behind a new, women-driven era in country music. She advises those seeking to build their own careers to push past fear and, as she learned herself, consistently show up.
“I look back and every time I didn’t want to go to something, I know that God is telling me to go do it, and that’s just me fighting it. A lot of those times, I’ll get anxiety before I go on bus runs or on [writing] retreats. I was like, ‘I don’t know if I can do this,’ but then I’m like, ‘No, I have to show up.’ And every time I did it, it ended up being where I needed to be. I think it’s so important, anytime you get invited, try to say yes. Also, find your crew. My whole career changed when I found my crew. I finally felt like I had a home here.”
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