Shania Twain‘s “You’re Still the One,” a Number Two hit from 1998, has enjoyed something of a renaissance in recent years with artists as diverse as Harry Styles, boygenius, and Christian Lee Hutson covering it, often as duets. Now, Ella Langley has joined the chorus of artists who find inspiration in the song, which is about a doomed couple hanging on inexplicably, kind of a less clever update of John Prine’s “In Spite of Ourselves” if you read the lyrics closely enough. But for what the song lacks in wit, Langley, like everyone else who has sung it (including Twain), makes up for it with sentimentality.
Langley accompanies herself on piano in the clip, which she posted to TikTok with the caption, “I’ll never get over this song.” The instrumentation and Langley’s quivering voice gives the tune an elegiac feel, as if she’s mourning a damaged relationship in real time, determined to lie herself into celebrating one anniversary after another with her lover. “Just look at us holding on,” she sings with true heart. “We’re still together, still going strong.” She almost sounds like she believes it. The rendition was so moving that Twain herself commented on it: “So flattered ❤️Loved getting to connect at ACMs xx.”
Langley’s most recent album, Dandelion, came out in April and was a Number One hit. The album’s “Choosin’ Texas” won two ACMs, and Langley claimed another three for herself and her duet with Riley Green, “Don’t Mind if I Do.”
Twain wrote the song with her then husband, Robert “Mutt” Lange, who produced her albums, as well as hits for Def Leppard and AC/DC. She was reflecting on naysayers prognosticating that the nearly two-decade age gap between the couple would lead to the couple’s demise.
“Mutt and I are an unlikely pair,” Twain told The Spokesman-Review in 1997. “There’s been talk in the tabloids that we’re divorcing, but we are very happy. We love each other in every way. We have a great creative relationship and a great personal relationship. We feel as strong as ever, and ‘Still the One’ is sort of my own personal victory song about the marriage.”
After the couple divorced in 2010, Twain no longer saw the song as applying to her relationship with Lange. “I think the biggest value of ‘You’re Still the One’ is that it’s become the people’s song,” Twain told Line of the Best Fit in 2023. “Because it no longer applies to Mutt and I. With songwriting, I think a lot of the time you have to sort of let your original meanings go, because the meaning of a song can evolve so much once it’s out there. Once you give it to the public, they make it their own. They have their own reasons for loving it.” In 2019, Rolling Stone rated the song Twain’s best overall.
