It’s no stretch to say that Ella Langley and Riley Green’s viral hit, “you look like you love me” is one of the biggest country songs of the year. Racking up over 112 million streams on Spotify alone, the track has been nothing short of a career-starter for Langley.
After an appearance on the Today show on October 22nd, Langley and Green were invited to perform the smash hit on The Tonight Show last night.
There’s absolutely no denying that Langley is a rockstar with an immense amount of talent. With that being said, however, it is pretty clear that the “weren’t for the wind” singer was pretty nervous during the performance. And who can really blame her? Not only is a late-night TV show appearance daunting given the fact that 1.4 million people on average tune in to The Tonight Show daily, but it’s also simply not the same environment as a standard concert.
Commenters on Langley and The Tonight Show’s joint Instagram post began criticizing Langley with some simply pointing out that she sounded and looked nervous and others outright bashing her with comments reading, “Is she not doing too much??,” “Was this her first time performing live?” and “She went a little overboard and should have stayed cool like him. Not good.”
The comments were, obviously, needlessly harsh, but that’s the internet for you. However, for some inexplicable reason, Elle King decided to inject herself into the situation and defended Langley with some incredibly strange comments.
You can read some of them for yourself here:
The most baffling reply from King, to me, is the first one. There’s no doubt that the original comment was complimenting Langley on her looks with the Instagram user saying she looks bad, which despite using the word “bad” is a compliment. I have to assume that King simply didn’t understand that he meant the comment as a compliment, but the fact that the 35-year-old singer resorted to using “your mom” jokes as a response is pretty embarrassing, to say the least.
It’s been pretty well-documented at this point that King has some serious substance abuse issues, highlighted primarily by her drunken Opry performance back in January. Judging by the strange nature of these comments and their timing (they were written at roughly 5 a.m.), it makes one wonder what made her fire them off. This isn’t to say that she was under the influence of anything, but it sure seems like it…
Props to King for defending another woman in the industry, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to say this was not the way to go about it.