I started playing around with the idea of manifesting happiness instead of projecting my own sadness.
“Right after COVID-19 hit, I wanted to be working on something, but I really felt that - with how depressing the world already was at that point - I couldn’t handle writing a depressing song. “I was in a worse place when I was making the album and didn’t have a grip on my depression,” he says. For something so positive to serve as a career-defining moment was unexpected. Rutter is still processing the phenomenon that is this cover’s success - because, he says, the music he writes is usually a projection of his own deep sadness. According to Rolling Stone’s data and analytics provider Alpha Data, total steams of the track are up by 282 percent when comparing the week of September 11th with the week of August 28th. Makeup influencers like Abby Roberts (who has 12 million followers) and James Charles (24 million followers) have all used the song videos from the two of them alone attracted 35 million views. Though he released the Corinne Bailey Rae cover in late April through independent service Distrokid, it was TikTok user Skiian’s use of the song that propelled it into true virality. He’d moved to Los Angeles a year ago with the intent of inserting himself into the music industry, but moved back to Salt Lake earlier this month because COVID was putting a damper on those plans - ironically, however, the industry would soon be coming to him. Rutter didn’t expect to break through via a viral cover song. Read Put Your Records On - Corinne Bailey Rae from the story Singing by JeanetteChipette (J e a n e t t e) with 85 reads.Three little birds, sat on my. He signed a deal with Disruptor/Columbia Records two days ago, on Tuesday. It seemed like I was just chilling and then, all of a sudden, a hundred people run into my house like, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!'” “It happened fast, and within a day or two, I was getting on all these Zoom calls with labels,” Rutter recalls.