But we’ve actually been talking to Disruptor for over a year now. And then my manager was like, “Hey man, we’ve got five calls today, five calls tomorrow and six calls the next day.” It was pretty intense. The TikTok stuff started happening and then the streaming numbers started going up a lot. What was that process like? Why is this the right home for you? You signed a record deal with Disruptor/Columbia in September. It’s the fact that it’s just a really good song. I think people give me way too much credit for doing cool production because it’s not the production that gets people dancing to it or makes people really like it. Songwriting will always be the main driving force behind how much anybody likes a song. Why is it important to you that fans are listening to Rae’s original version, too? It was really nice to just have fun producing something. The majority of the people in the world that know anything about me are going to only know these lyrics about me, and that’s just really heavy. It’s hard for me to have a lot of fun working on music these days because there is all the pressure of these words that I’m going to sing right now are going to be there forever. Working on my own music is definitely edifying and therapeutic, but it’s intense. How does your process for recording a cover compare to creating original music? I was seeing it as a fun side thing that I could put out in between albums. I wasn’t at all expecting anything that happened from it to happen. But working on that song, I was like, “This is a really well-written song, objectively.” That part of me wanted to remind people about it. I went through a pretty intense pretentious indie kid phase, where I had zero appreciation for pop music. It’s also just such a good song, obviously. It has always been the epitome of a joyful, hopeful song for me. It reminded me of writing in the back of my mom’s minivan and a much simpler time. My mom really loves that song - around when it came out, she’d play it all the time. You know the songs that you just have memorized your whole life? It was totally one of those songs for me. What is it about “Put Your Records On” that made you want to cover it? I was working on it over a couple of weeks, and I finished it at the beginning of April. It was like how I used to put out music: work on something, finish it and then just throw it up on the internet. So, I was like, let’s switch it up and do something super happy because it felt like that could be therapeutic for me. I came back to my parents’ house, and I wanted to be productive, but working on something heavier just seemed like too much sadness at the time.

I was set to open on tour for Dayglow - we actually played two shows in Chicago and then the rest got canceled. You released “Put Your Records On” in late April. I’m still just a kid messing around in Logic in a lot of ways. Because it’s just a ton of experimentation right now. I think might be something to save for when I know what I want to do more. But with most of the songs being super personal to me, it has always been really important that it sounds like me. I’ve thought about that a lot and there are definitely pluses - I’m not great at guitar or drums. Though it’s now your solo project, Ritt Momney used to be a larger recording band. Below, Rutter talks about why he wanted to cover Rae’s song in particular, his recent record deal with Disruptor/Columbia and what he wants to discuss with the project’s namesake, Sen.

Ritt momney put your records on live