Ritt Momney

There was a time, in the earlier days of making music as Ritt Momney, that the artist needed the struggle, that the trial was the necessary portal to the art. Thus, a settled life, even a happy life, was viewed as a potential threat to the work. That was bad news for a musician who was recently married with a new house, living minutes away from family in Utah.

As it turns out, a comfortable artist still has something to say. BASE is Ritt Momney's new album (Feb. 27), exploring new moods and textures with the same emotional pull as ever before. Rutter recently sat down with us about how he's learned to set aside some artistic toxicity and detail the creative spaces he's not yet ready to step into.

Analogue: Jack, I think I talked to you last before the pandemic, when everything was new.

Jack Rutter: All of this was new. I may have even been a teenager at the time, right?

Analogue: Yeah. Now, I’m looking, and I see Instagram posts about being married. Congratulations, by the way. Life seems fairly robust, and then here comes some new music. That’s pretty vague, but how am I catching you at this stage?

Jack: Yeah, it feels like I'm settling in a nice way. I've been really enjoying the stability that I've had recently. Lindsay and I just got married. We have a house. We have two dogs. We're five minutes away from both of our parents, and it's a very, I would say, comfortable time in my life.

It's been really nice learning how to write music from that place, as opposed to feeling… The romantic idea around songwriting is that you have to struggle, that when you’re going through this insane heartbreak or something, that’s when you really write your best stuff.

Coming from this comfortable, stable place, it feels like it gives me more of a solid foundation to go on. It allows me, in a more controlled way, to venture into the darker stuff and explore other parts of my brain that maybe I wouldn't have the awareness or maybe bandwidth to explore if I were coming from a tumultuous spot, I guess. It's been a pretty overwhelmingly positive time in my life for the past couple of years. It definitely took a while to understand that I don't have to be struggling to make good or honest or interesting music.

I've found that my music has become maybe a little less self-involved or self-interested. With the first album, it felt like I had something really specific that I was feeling, and it's a very personal album that obviously some people can relate to. I think I was in a place where I felt like I had to do it, but it was a lot of talking about myself in ways that, I think, honestly made me feel sort of alone in the writing process.

Obviously, after I hear about people who heard it and know exactly what I'm talking about, it makes them feel like seen or something, and that makes me feel less alone. However, it feels like I've been writing more from a human perspective than a me perspective. It feels less like ego-driven kind of music, and I think that that has really come from this. This stable place has given me that ability.

Analogue: Would you have thought before that that was antithetical to making good art?

Jack: Yeah, and I think that's a pretty common misconception about music—or just art or creativity. I read this Jeff Tweedy book and how, to write one song, he talks about how he was like an addict and living a crazy lifestyle, and when he got sober, he was worried that it was going to take his songwriting away.

It's honestly probably a kind of a PR scam. It's just so much more interesting to people when you're talking about like Kurt Cobain, where he's like struggling so hard, and it’s actually really sick, because it made all this music happen, and that's just like a lot more marketable. I feel kind of insecure about this marketing campaign a little bit, where I feel some sort of pressure to come up with something wrong.

Analogue: Like drama sells, and you don't have it.

Jack: Yeah. If I was dealing with some kind of major life problem or something, then I could just talk about that all the time in these interviews. Then that could be the headline on the write-ups. But I think it is really important for people to understand that you really can go anywhere you want if you're coming from like a solid foundation.

I can write from anywhere. Everybody has all of these different feelings going on in their head, like I'm talking about how positive my life has been and how settled I feel, but just like anybody in those kinds of situations, I've had times where I feel really shitty or really depressed or really insecure or really scared of the future. I think everybody has all of those feelings going on somewhere, and you can like venture into all of those places, and you can also stay where you are.

I still don't really like writing happy songs, even if I'm feeling happy. It always feels more interesting to me to go somewhere darker. It sounds kind of melodramatic, but I've felt the pull to make something go wrong, or have some kind of major addiction, because all the coolartists have something like that going on. Obviously, that's not even true. Like I said, it's kind of a scam, and I worry that it gets in the way of people creating stuff, because they don't think they’ll have anything interesting to say.

Analogue: I'm glad that you referenced that darker tendency in the songwriting, because it’s not like you’re whistling on the new album, right? It's not this buoyant thing. It sets an immediate mood, and it kind of lives there. Have you ever written a straightforward, fun song?

Jack: I’ve written a couple of songs for Lindsay that are just happy kind of love songs. I wish it didn't feel so much less interesting to me to write something happy or positive. Because I'm sure there are deeper aspects of that, stuff I just haven't gotten to yet in my awareness of them. It does feel more immediately appealing to go into the deeper side of the sad stuff or the darker stuff than the happy stuff. But I think that's a venture I need to take at some point.

Analogue: There’s gotta be a sunny side to the release, to get new music out there, right?

Jack: Yeah, I'm excited for people to hear it. One really awesome part of this process is that the release feels like more of an epilogue than the destination. It feels like I love the music, and I'm really proud that I made it. I love showing my friends. They say they like it and that feels awesome. I want to release it and share it with people because I love it.

Something that I've always kind of struggled with is the relationship that I'm supposed to have with fans and stuff. I've gone through phases where I'm like, ‘Oh, man, like, I don't owe the fans anything. I'm gonna do whatever I need to do.’ Which is generally, I think, the right way to go about it. You shouldn't do stuff for the fans.

But it also makes me really happy thinking about some kid who was 15 when Her and All of My Friends came out, and they really enjoyed that album, and it helped them in some way. For them to hear something else, I like the idea of growing together. I like seeing where the fans and I can kind of relate now.

VISIT: Ritt Momney

Photo: Sam Angeletti