Songfacts®:

• "Speaking Terms" is Ella Langley's quiet spiritual reflection on faith, doubt, and desire to feel heard by God again. Though her prayers feel like a one-way conversation, she holds fast to her hope that the Lord will speak to her in return.
• Langley approaches faith here not as something polished and victorious, but as something lived in, and occasionally limped through. She sings of feeling distant from God while still longing to be heard, a classic human predicament that echoes throughout the Psalms. There is no grand theological system here; just the uneasy grace of a woman saying, "I'm struggling, but I'm still talking."
• Langley recorded "Speaking Terms" for her sophomore album Dandelion. It is one of only two songs on the album not written by Langley herself, the other being a cover of Kitty Wells' 1952 country song "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels."
• Joybeth Taylor and Helene Cronin penned "Speaking Terms." That Langley chose to record a song she didn't write speaks to how deeply it reflected her own experience, particularly in the context of the mental and spiritual reset she went through during her August 2025 health break, when she spoke openly about reconnecting with her faith.
• Joybeth Taylor is Langley's most frequent creative collaborator across Dandelion, co-writing 12 tracks, including "Choosin' Texas" and the tile track.
  
  Texas-based Americana singer-songwriter Helene Cronin is a winner of the Kerrville New Folk competition, one of the most prestigious prizes in the songwriting world. Her 2025 album, Maybe New Mexico, earned a glowing review from Americana UK, which praised her "extraordinary talent for pulling out skein after skein of vivid, passionately felt imagery."
• Cronin and Joybeth Taylor are close friends, and the two wrote "Speaking Terms" together as a deeply personal song. Taylor then began performing it around Nashville, where it started to attract attention. As Langley's best friend, Ella heard it regularly, and over time fell in love with it enough to put it on hold for Dandelion. The song then spent over a year and a half in the pile of potential album tracks before making the final cut.
• Langley described "Speaking Terms" during a TikTok Live as her "God song" on the album; confirming it resonated so personally that she felt no need to write her own version of the same sentiment.
• Musically, "Speaking Terms" steps away from the electric crackle and pedal-steel ache that runs through much of Dandelion. Instead, it settles into something almost devotional built around acoustic guitar and strings. The musicians are:
  
  Ben West: acoustic guitar
  Gideon Klein: cello and string arrangement
  David Angell: violin
  David Davidson: violin
  Monica Angell: viola
  
  Ben West co-produced the track along with Langley and Miranda Lambert.
• "Speaking Terms" is track 10 on Dandelion. It connects thematically to "Loving Life Again"; both songs emerge from the same period of personal crisis in 2025 when Langley stepped away from touring, returned to Alabama, and described growing her relationship with her faith. Where "Loving Life Again" documents the recovery, "Speaking Terms" captures the honest wrestling that made the recovery necessary.