WednesdayMar312021
Daniel PrakopcykRitt Momney's version of Corinne Bailey Rae's 2006 hit "Put Your Records On" has been climbing steadily ever since it blew up on TikTok last year: It's gone Gold and is now top 5 on Billboard's Pop Airplay chart. Not bad for a song that the artist, born Jack Rutter, thought of as just a "fun little side project."
Jack had been struggling with writer's block because he found working on his own music to be too intense, so he thought it'd help to just mess around with a song he'd loved from childhood. That's how he came up with the dreamy, psychedelic feel of his version.
"I tried to really just have fun with it and just kind of make the intuitive production decisions," he tells ABC Audio. "Like, whatever I wanted to hear, I tried to just recreate that, instead of just thinking about it too much."
"I got super into the thinking aspect of music, and it kind of took a lot away from the feeling part of it," he explains, adding, "I was really being super-meditative about all the lyrics, instead of just, like, saying, 'Oh, this is what sounds good. I'm gonna just sing that.'"
Working on "Put Your Records On," which he didn't write, freed Jack from all of that.
"It was really nice to just kind of set the lyrics aside," he recalls. "Like, 'They're already there, the chord progression is already there. I'm just going to have fun with this. It's just going to be, like, a fun little side project that I can do in between albums."
It ended up being more than that, of course. But as he told Billboard last year, if "Records" ends up being his only pop hit, he'll "be totally fine with that."
By Andrea Dresdale
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