With a new song she co-wrote featured on Dutton Ranch, and still riding high on the success of a Landman feature, the Nashville songwriter is seizing her moment

Dani Rose knows a trend when she sees one. The Virginia native and Nashville songwriter built her career partly by staying hyper aware of where the winds in social media, streaming, and television will blow next. Rose, who had a song she co-wrote featured in Friday’s anticipated premiere of Dutton Ranch, says it’s all in the vibes.

“Before it wasn’t trendy for female country musicians to rise up,” Rose tells Rolling Stone, zeroing in on a dominant current storyline in country music. “Now, it is absolutely a trend. People want to dress like Lainey [Wilson], they want to dress like Ella [Langley], they want to look like Megan Moroney. It’s not just a person singing anymore, they’re like superheroes or action figures.”

Rose herself is on an action-figure path in the Taylor Sheridan universe. She’s had songs already featured in Sheridan’s Yellowstone and Landman, and on the May 15th debut of Dutton Ranch on Paramount+, fans heard “What You Don’t Know,” a song she co-wrote with Lukas Nelson and Lily Meola. (“What You Don’t Know” is streaming now.)

Rose has history with the Sheridan stable of gritty TV series. She had a hand in the most musically powerful moment of Landman’s previous season, when the heart-wrenching “Touch and Go” — her collab with Drayton Farley and Sunny Sweeney — became a viral hit. Written at a workshop organized by Andrea von Foerster, the music supervisor for much of Sheridan’s television work, including Landman, Yellowstone, and Dutton Ranch, the song was synced with a gut-punch scene.

“I remember Drayton saying, ‘I have this cool title, ‘Touch and Go,’’ and it reminding me of my parents and being at home and feeling like I’m still a little kid while my parents keep getting older,” Rose says. “It was so sad and depressing, and we were sitting there crying. I was like, ‘I wish I could turn back time in my dad’s eyes,’ and Sunny goes, ‘Yes! There we go!’”

How Rose first entered Sheridan’s circle, however, was less of a business plan and more of a survival instinct. Before finding social media success and seeing her music stream alongside that of Zach Bryan, Whiskey Myers, and Flatland Cavalry in Yellowstone, Rose felt untethered. Her family moved from rural Virginia to Tokyo when she was in fifth grade for her father’s job, causing Rose to grow up fast. “I became a fully functioning adult, I would say, by seventh grade,” she says.

But the culture shock of a move back to Virginia in high school hit her hard. She stuck around through college at Virginia Tech, but soon after, she moved to Los Angeles, hoping to harness her independent drive into something creative. About three years into the move, she started dabbling in music, picking up gigs at places like Hotel Cafe.

Rose played with a band around California for more than eight years before moving to Nashville in 2024. But it was in California where she wrote “Got It From My Mama,” which took off on social media.

“That was wild,” Rose recalls. “I remember when it went to number two, just below Lizzo’s ‘About Damn Time,’ and I was thinking, ‘I am an independent country artist, and I am at number two on the U.S. TikTok charts. Do you know how crazy that is?’ I wrote that song because I missed my mother so much. I co-wrote it over Covid, because I couldn’t see her. And I remember people reaching out, making their own videos with their moms, using it for their dance with their mother at their weddings, or making it their funeral songs. The different ways that song resonated with people — they just found it, and it blew all the wheels off of everything.”

Shortly before that, she had fallen into van Foerster’s orbit and landed on Yellowstone. In the six years that ensued, she became one of the most reliable voices across Sheridan’s soundtracks. This September, Sheridan will host a daylong festival — the second such event — at his Bosque Ranch in Weatherford, Texas. Rose is on the bill, which is headlined by Shane Smith & the Saints, one of the biggest beneficiaries of the bump in stature that comes with being showcased in the work of Sheridan and, particularly, von Foerster.

“Everything I write, I think is real,” Rose says. “But Andrea will always go after the songs that had me crying when I wrote them.”

Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous is available now via Back Lounge Publishing.