Julianna Rankin spent the past two years placing a bet on herself. Just as she gained a foothold as part of the latest group of rising Texas stars touring relentlessly across the Lone Star State, Rankin hit pause. She had touring figured out, she thought, but she wanted to improve as a songwriter. “Being off the road as a musician is daunting. It can get dark at times, because you don’t have that steady income,” Rankin says of her decision. This week, though, Rankin sees that bet pay off.
On Wednesday, Rankin released the single “Bad Habits and Good Horses,” her first on the Big Loud Texas label founded three years ago by Miranda Lambert and Jon Randall. The tune will also feature in Sunday’s season finale of Landman, Taylor Sheridan’s Paramount+ series that has doubled as a gateway for independent Texas, Red Dirt, and Americana artists to reach substantial audiences in a single scene.
A Landman feature alone may not be a skeleton key for success, but it’s a massive platform for Rankin’s mellow vocals and hard country lyrics like “Bad habits, good horses, ‘cause they’re hell on a heart.”
“I’ve been calling it, for lack of a better word, a hammer of a song,” Rankin says. “It’s so much fun. I just played it acoustic on a little acoustic tour with William Beckmann, and I loved it. My band is loving it too. It’s one of those songs that I feel like everyone can relate to. It’s such a broad message, not only coming from country roots like myself. I come from a family of bankers and cattle ranchers, so I grew up around horses, and I also grew up around bad habits — as we all have.”
The song came from a writing camp that Landman music supervisor Andrea von Foerster organized with Big Loud Texas. Rankin co-wrote it with Garrett Bradford — who previously had a song featured in Sheridan’s Yellowstone — and Jon Decious, whose songs have been cut by Lainey Wilson, Tyler Braden, and Lambert herself.
When they set out to write what would become “Bad Habits and Good Horses,” von Foerster shared the backstory of a specific scene. It wasn’t intended to be a part of the finale, but when von Foerster heard the finished product, she called an audible and worked it into Sunday’s episode.
“We had walked into the room not knowing what was in store for all of us,” Rankin says. “Andrea walked in with a plan and gave us some key points to run with, and gave us a lot of freedom.”
Rankin is a native Texan with deep musical roots. Her grandfather played in a Texas-based band in the 1970s, and she grew up nurturing a love for Merle Haggard, Stevie Nicks, and Carole King. “I remember the first time I heard ‘Blue Bayou’ by Linda Ronstadt,” she says.” I was just in awe and floored. I didn’t even realize, looking back as a kid, how influential it was on me. I realized, ‘OK, well this makes sense now. This is why I’ve always loved it so much. It’s because it’s what I was born to do.’”
Still, she didn’t take it seriously as a career path until, as a student at Texas A&M, she ended up spending nights at the Tap, a local bar in College Station, Texas, singing karaoke. One night some patrons assumed Rankin was a musician and asked her where they could find her singing around town. That was the first time she thought, “Maybe I should learn to play the guitar.”
“I started getting better at it and posting covers on Facebook,” she says. One Mother’s Day, she gave her mom a simple phone recording of her singing Lauren Alaina’s “Like My Mother Doe.” “My dad, immediately, was like, ‘You should really think about doing this.’”
After college, she moved to New Braunfels, one of the musical hotbeds of Texas music and fell in with established artists like Wade Bowen and Randy Rogers. Bowen, in particular, began inviting Rankin to join him during festival sets, and she gained enough exposure to build a following in Texas. Then, when Lambert’s parents caught Rankin playing at the 2024 Mile 0 Festival in Key West, Florida, they turned their daughter onto her as well.
At the time, Big Loud Texas was very much in its infancy, but Lambert wanted Rankin to be a part of the label. Lambert, Randall, and Jack Ingram met Rankin in person in Austin that year at a celebration for the 40th anniversary of the venerable Arlyn Studios. It was supposed to be a business meeting, but Rankin doesn’t recall talking shop at all.
“We stayed up until about five in the morning just passing guitars around and swapping songs,” she says. “It was a dream night for any musician because you’re sitting in the room with your heroes. Those were three people who I grew up listening to from a songwriters’ standpoint. We got to know each other, and I keep saying it’s all cosmic. It was in the stars from the beginning.”
She signed to Big Loud despite having little more than a handful of singles and her 2023 EP, Top Shelf, in her catalog.
That’s when Rankin realized she needed to hone her songwriting if she was to be taken seriously. She committed herself to the craft, scheduling a series of trips to Nashville to co-write even before joining Big Loud.
“A lot of my favorite songs that have come out from the past two years have started by just sitting there with the writers and talking for two hours before we even start writing a song,” she says. “Just getting to know people — if I can walk out of there and have made a friend and maybe not even have a song, I feel like some day, me and that friend will write a song.”
Josh Crutchmer is a journalist and author whose book (Almost) Almost Famous will be released April 1 via Back Lounge Publishing.
