Mitt Romney, the Republican senator from Utah who’s a Mormon father of five, a Black Lives Matter protester, and former private investment company giant who just turned 75, isn’t exactly who you’d expect to be a fan of a mustachioed Gen Z indie artist who donates a portion of ticket sales to abortion rights organizations. But today, Romney posted on Twitter that he’d met up with TikTok famous musician Jack Rutter, who goes by the name Ritt Momney.
Rutter, a 22-year-old Salt Lake City native whose cover of “Put Your Records On” catapulted him to fame in 2020, told Deseret News that he’d chosen the name “Ritt Momney” when he was in a high school garage band and had kept the name when his bandmates left to go on Mormon missions.
"There's no reason, man," Rutter said of the band name in an interview with Deseret News. "We were high school kids. It was sort of a subversion — a 'stick-it-to-the-man' sort of thing."
Put your records on—
Rutter’s cover of the Corinne Bailey Rae song became a quarantine-era soundtrack of short-form makeup tutorials on TikTok. It eventually helped land him a deal with Columbia Records, a spot on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and a number of interviews — including one with Billboard in which Rutter mentioned he might “set up a meeting some time and go talk abortion rights” with Mitt Romney.
And now that Rutter’s in Washington DC for a concert at the Songbyrd Music House on Wednesday night, the crossover finally happened. I suppose we should have seen it coming, but it shocked me nonetheless, and now I can’t shake the mental image of Mitt Romney bumping to dreamy lo-fi indie music.
Perhaps Romney will eventually retire and dive into the arts, like prolific portrait painter George W. Bush. If he does, I’m officially suggesting he adopt the band name ‘Rack Jutter.’
