Ella Langley has a big couple of weeks ahead. The country singer from Alabama is up for nine CMA Awards on Wednesday, Nov 18, and this Friday the 13th her new song lands on a movie album.
The album is “The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping,” and it comes out Friday, Nov 13, one week before the film opens in theaters. Ella’s song is called “Here Then We’re Gone,” and it sits at track 8.
A Friday the 13th release is a fitting time to tell the spookiest story from Ella’s childhood. It didn’t happen in a horror movie. It happened with her church youth group.
Ella grew up Southern Baptist in Alabama. She went to church on Sundays and Wednesdays until she was 18. Back in April she sat down with podcast host Theo Von on his show “This Past Weekend,” and the talk wandered all over her life. This short clip from that same sit-down has Ella talking about her long road to success in Nashville, which is a good place to start if you’re just getting to know her.
Ella Langley tells Theo Von about her road to Nashville
Somewhere in that long talk, Ella asked Theo if he’d ever been to a Judgement House.
If you didn’t grow up in that world, she has a simple way to put it. “It’s like a haunted house for Christians, I guess.”
This one was a Halloween event. “I remember our youth group took us,” she said. It was very scary, the kind of walk-through meant to make kids think hard about the end of life and where they stood with God.
At the end, the leaders asked anyone who wasn’t sure about their faith to sit down and talk.
Here’s the twist. Ella had already been saved and baptized. But she was so shaken that she didn’t take any chances. “I raised my hand,” she said. She ended up talking with a man at a booth and got saved again.
This next clip from the same conversation is Ella on her Baptist upbringing, the world this whole story comes from.
Ella Langley on growing up Baptist in Alabama
Then she went home to tell her dad.
“I’ll never forget coming home and my dad was laying on the couch watching Titanic,” Ella said.
She walked in with big news. “Dad, I need to talk to you about something,” she told him. “I got saved again tonight.”
He paused the movie.
“You did what?!”
As Ella tells it, her dad then explained, in his own salty way, that being saved only has to happen once. In Ella’s words, “that’s the whole point of being saved.”
It still makes her laugh. And plenty of families who spent their Wednesday nights in a church pew have a dad just like him.
Come Friday, fans will be pressing play on “Here Then We’re Gone” for the first time, and the CMAs follow five days later. Big stuff. Still, it’s hard to top a dad who hit pause on “Titanic” because his little girl walked in with news that couldn’t wait.