Jesse Rutherford (born August 21, 1991) is the Southern California singer, songwriter and producer best known as frontman of The Neighbourhood, and separately, since 2011, as the architect of a parallel solo catalog released under his own name, the stylized &, and, from 2024 onward, Jesse®: a discography and public identity built, by his own account, as the deliberate tonal opposite of the band's austere black-and-white visual language.
Most of the world knows Jesse Rutherford as the voice behind The Neighbourhood's breakout single “Sweater Weather,” the 11-week Billboard Alternative Songs No. 1 that TikTok later made bigger nearly a decade after release. Running alongside that band career, largely unnoticed by casual fans, is a second body of work: solo releases stretching back to a self-produced 2011 mixtape, a full Columbia Records debut LP in 2017, a GarageBand-app-produced record in 2019, an Atlantic Records deal in 2023, and a full rebrand as “Jesse®” in 2024. Where the band trades in monochrome minimalism, the solo project has always been coded in color, most literally around the 2023 single “Rainbow,” and has functioned as a space where Rutherford experiments with gender-fluid visual presentation, corporate-parody branding, and a much more publicly confessional songwriting mode, most visibly during his widely covered relationship with Billie Eilish.
Jesse James Rutherford was born August 21, 1991. English-language Wikipedia lists his birthplace as Thousand Oaks, California, while several secondary bios place his upbringing in Newbury Park, an unincorporated community that sits within the greater Thousand Oaks area of Ventura County; the two descriptions likely reflect the same geography rather than a genuine factual conflict. He has described a small household growing up: “just me, my mom, and my sister,” per his own account in a Genius interview. His parents are Susan and Steven Rutherford, and he has an older sister roughly nine years his senior. His father left the household when Rutherford was approximately five or six years old, a rupture he has cited in interviews as formative to his emotional outlook and, by extension, his songwriting.
Before music, Rutherford worked as a child actor. Credits include a 2002 episode of Star Trek: Enterprise (“Marauders”), a role in Life or Something Like It alongside Angelina Jolie, a television movie about Ted Bundy, and an uncredited part in Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star. As a kid he also performed NSYNC and Elvis impersonations at local talent shows, an early tell of the performance instincts that would carry into both his band and solo careers.
Rutherford's pre-Neighbourhood musical life ran through a small lineage of teenage hardcore and punk projects. He played bass in a band called Bearclaw, then fronted a group called Curicula. In 2009 he also formed a short-lived duo, The Good Boys, with rapper Jez Dior. His first true solo release predates The Neighbourhood's own formation: Truth Hurts, Truth Heals, a self-produced, 17-track mixtape released in 2011, the same year the band came together.
After The Neighbourhood's global breakout on the strength of “Sweater Weather” and years of quietly building a separate identity, Rutherford released his proper solo full-length debut, titled simply & (pronounced “Ampersand”), on November 10, 2017, via Columbia Records. The 11-track album arrived alongside a 144-page photo book shot by Jessie English and published by Remedial Media, a visual companion piece that explored gender fluidity through androgynous styling and presentation. The pairing of record and photo book set the template for how Rutherford would treat his solo output going forward: not just as music, but as a coordinated visual and conceptual project distinct from the band.
Rutherford followed his debut with GARAGEB&, released April 12, 2019, still on Columbia. The 12-track record was largely produced using the GarageBand iOS app, a lo-fi, self-contained production approach that stood in contrast to the fuller studio sound of both The Neighbourhood and his debut solo LP. Press coverage at the time, including a review in the Ky Kernel, framed the record as a scrappier, more experimental companion to & rather than an attempt to top it commercially. GARAGEB& closed out Rutherford's Columbia-era solo output; there would be no further solo releases under that label.
Rutherford's solo career resumed publicly in March 2023 with a new label home: Atlantic Records. The signing was timed to the release of two songs, “Joker” and “Rainbow,” covered by Rolling Stone as his return to solo output after a multi-year gap. That August, he released the mixtape &ONE, featuring tracks including “POV,” “Turn Heel,” “Second Rodeo,” “DX,” “Law of Attraction” and “Crisis,” several of which fans and press connected directly to his relationship with Billie Eilish (see below).
The bigger identity shift came a year later. On September 20, 2024, Rutherford released Wanted?, a 12-track album marking his debut under a new stage name: Jesse®, complete with a registered-trademark symbol. The album included “Shoot It Straight,” “Know Better,” “Thinkin Too Much,” “Guilty!,” “When I'm Sad,” “Spirit,” “Órale,” “Sorry,” “Living Room” and “Roses.” Fan and music-press discussion, including a Reddit r/popheads thread, has noted that the registered-trademark styling echoes producer BloodPop®'s branding convention from an earlier professional association in pop music, though this specific connection has not been officially confirmed by Rutherford himself and should be read as an observed stylistic parallel rather than a stated influence.
Rutherford has been explicit about the logic behind his solo visual identity, describing it in Office Magazine's “Jesse Rutherford's Blonde Ambition” profile as a direct inversion of the band's aesthetic: “We try and connect songs to seasons… I feel like I have to just say rainbow because it has to be the opposite of rainbow because The Neighbourhood has always done the black and white thing. But I don't know. I really do like yellow,” he said. That color-forward identity crystallized most visibly around the 2023 single “Rainbow” and carried through into the Jesse® rebrand the following year. The & era, by contrast, had leaned into androgynous, gender-fluid visual presentation, most explicitly through the accompanying photo book. Interview Magazine's profile, headlined “Who the F*ck Is Chip Chrome?”, covered a related alter-ego persona Rutherford developed that bridges his band and solo identities, underscoring how consistently he has treated persona and visual branding as core creative tools rather than incidental marketing.
Beyond recording deals, Rutherford co-founded Therapy Records, a music publishing company established in 2020 as a joint venture with Warner Chappell, alongside producer and co-founder Danny Parra, whose professional profile identifies him as “Music Publisher at Therapy Records (JV with Warner Chappell).” The venture positions Rutherford as an operator on the business side of songwriting and catalog ownership, not solely as a recording artist, a detail that distinguishes his solo trajectory from a straightforward vanity-project narrative.
The most extensively documented chapter of Rutherford's recent public life is his relationship with Billie Eilish. The two reportedly knew each other from around 2017, when Eilish was 15 or 16 and Rutherford was 26, a detail that generated significant age-gap commentary once the relationship became public years later. They were first seen together on August 5, 2022, at the premiere of I Love My Dad, and were reported to have dined together at Crossroads Kitchen in mid-October 2022. They were photographed holding hands and kissing at Halloween Horror Nights between October 15 and 18, 2022, and made the relationship Instagram-official on November 1, 2022, via matching “baby and old man” Halloween costumes, a choice widely read in coverage as a direct wink at the age-gap discourse surrounding them. Their red-carpet debut followed on November 5, 2022, at the LACMA Art+Film Gala in matching Gucci looks, and Eilish confirmed the relationship publicly in a November 28, 2022 Vanity Fair interview.
The couple continued through Eilish's 21st birthday in December 2022 (marked with matching Santa outfits), a Vanity Fair Oscar party in clown makeup in March 2023, and a final public sighting together at Coachella in April 2023. The breakup was confirmed as amicable via representatives on May 17, 2023, with both sides denying cheating rumors and describing the split as mutual. By August 2023, Eilish publicly called him “homie forever” in an Instagram Q&A, and in later remarks covered by Billboard and People, she described him as remaining “one of my favorite people,” while joking that she was “never dating again.”
The relationship fed directly into Rutherford's music. “POV,” from &ONE, is widely interpreted by fans and outlets including Elite Daily and Uproxx as addressing the relationship and the public scrutiny it drew, including lyrics referencing Eilish's age and a controversial “daddy issues” line. “Turn Heel,” from the same mixtape, name-checks her directly: “I just got a text from Billie Eilish.” Prior to Eilish, Rutherford was in a long, on-and-off relationship with model and influencer Devon Lee Carlson from roughly 2015 through 2021 or 2022, a relationship that ended before he was first linked to Eilish in the fall of 2022.
Documented live history for the & and GARAGEB& era is thin, but material is far more substantial for the Wanted? cycle. A filmed full concert from The Belasco in Los Angeles captures a “Jesse® Live” set spanning “Shoot It Straight,” “I Think We Should Stay In Love,” “Softcore,” “Girls & Boys,” “Know Better,” “Thinkin Too Much,” “OVERWHELMING,” “WANTED,” a cover of Lana Del Rey's “Blue Jeans,” “LAVENDER,” “When I'm Sad,” “Rainbow,” “Pretty Boy,” “Bloom Later” and “Living Room.” A subsequently announced, much larger international solo tour for 2025 and 2026 has been reported to include stops at Toronto's Danforth Music Hall, Chicago's Thalia Hall, Denver's Ogden Theatre, San Francisco's Fillmore, and a return to LA's Belasco, plus dates across the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Denmark and Germany, shows in Brisbane and Sydney, and a spring 2026 North American leg reaching Nashville's Ryman Auditorium, Washington D.C.'s 9:30 Club, Toronto's Massey Hall, Minneapolis's First Avenue and Austin's Stubb's, among other venues. This particular schedule stems from fan-compiled tracking rather than an official ticketing source and should be treated as provisional pending confirmation through Ticketmaster, Live Nation or Rutherford's own artist channels.
One thread ties Rutherford to Los Angeles singer-songwriter Christian Gates. The woman who stars in Gates's “Dangerous State of Mind” music video, released in mid-July 2022, is Aris (known on Instagram as @arishasfeelings), an artist and model in her own right, and Rutherford was briefly in a relationship with Aris around the time of that filming, in the window between his relationships with Devon Lee Carlson and Billie Eilish, whom he began dating that October.
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1991 | Born August 21 in the Thousand Oaks / Newbury Park area of Ventura County, California |
| 2002 | Appears in Star Trek: Enterprise episode “Marauders” as a child actor |
| 2009 | Forms short-lived duo The Good Boys with rapper Jez Dior |
| 2011 | Self-releases 17-track mixtape Truth Hurts, Truth Heals; The Neighbourhood forms later the same year |
| 2017 | Releases solo debut LP & on Columbia Records, November 10, with an accompanying photo book |
| 2019 | Releases GARAGEB& on Columbia, April 12, produced largely on the GarageBand app |
| 2020 | Co-founds Therapy Records, a publishing joint venture with Warner Chappell, alongside Danny Parra |
| 2022 | First publicly seen with Billie Eilish (August); relationship goes Instagram-official (November 1) |
| 2023 | Signs new solo deal with Atlantic Records (March); releases “Joker”/“Rainbow” and later the &ONE mixtape (August 18); breakup with Eilish confirmed as mutual (May 17) |
| 2024 | Releases Wanted? on September 20, debuting the Jesse® rebrand |
| 2025–2026 | Reported international solo tour dates across North America, the UK, Europe and Australia (fan-compiled, unofficial as of latest check) |
Tracking of Rutherford's “Jesse®” Spotify artist profile by Kworb.net shows approximately 293.8 million total streams across 43 tracks, with roughly 202 million of those attributed to lead or solo-artist credit across 36 tracks, and daily solo streams around 23,000 as of mid-2026. A separate, single-source student-press profile from Cougar Daily cited approximately 593,933 monthly Spotify listeners, naming “Bloom Later” (5.87 million plays), “Barbie & Ken” (2.51 million plays) and “I Think We Should Stay In Love” (1.93 million plays) as his top solo tracks. Because that figure comes from a single outlet rather than a continuously tracked metric, it should be read as a snapshot rather than a current, ongoing number. Rutherford also streams directly to fans via SoundCloud, including Wanted?-era singles posted ahead of official release. As of the most recent data available, none of these solo figures approach the scale of The Neighbourhood's catalog-wide streaming totals, a gap consistent with solo work functioning as a creative outlet parallel to, rather than a replacement for, the band.
| Release | Date | Label | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Truth Hurts, Truth Heals (mixtape) | 2011 | Self-released | 17 tracks; predates The Neighbourhood's formation later that year |
| & (“Ampersand”) | November 10, 2017 | Columbia | Debut solo LP, 11 tracks; paired with a 144-page photo book by Jessie English |
| GARAGEB& | April 12, 2019 | Columbia | 12 tracks, largely produced on the GarageBand iOS app |
| “Joker” / “Rainbow” (single) | March 28, 2023 | Atlantic | First releases following his new solo signing to Atlantic Records |
| &ONE (mixtape) | August 18, 2023 | Atlantic | Includes “POV,” “Turn Heel,” “Second Rodeo,” “DX,” “Law of Attraction,” “Crisis” |
| Wanted? | September 20, 2024 | Atlantic | First release under the “Jesse®” rebrand; 12 tracks including “Shoot It Straight,” “Know Better,” “Guilty!,” “Living Room” |
No. Rutherford is the frontman of The Neighbourhood, but he has released solo material under his own name and, later, the stylized & and Jesse® monikers since as early as 2011, on a separate release schedule with its own label deals, visual identity and touring history.
The stylized ampersand, pronounced “Ampersand,” began as the title of his 2017 Columbia Records solo debut and doubled as a visual and gender-fluid identity marker, extended into his 2019 follow-up GARAGEB& and his 2023 mixtape &ONE.
The registered-trademark styling debuted with his 2024 album Wanted? on Atlantic Records, marking a rebrand of his solo identity. Fans have noted a stylistic echo of producer BloodPop®'s branding, though Rutherford has not officially confirmed that as a direct influence.
Yes. The relationship is extensively documented from their first public sighting in August 2022 through an Instagram-official announcement that November, a red-carpet debut at the LACMA Art+Film Gala, and a confirmed amicable breakup in May 2023. Both parties have spoken publicly and warmly about each other since.
Yes, through the artist Aris, who stars in Christian Gates's “Dangerous State of Mind” music video and was briefly in a relationship with Rutherford around that filming, before his relationship with Billie Eilish.
These titles do not appear in any verifiable discography source, including Wikipedia, Apple Music or Genius. The confirmed solo release sequence runs Truth Hurts, Truth Heals (2011), & (2017), GARAGEB& (2019), the “Joker”/“Rainbow” singles and &ONE mixtape (2023), and Wanted? as Jesse® (2024).
Therapy Records is a music publishing company Rutherford co-founded in 2020 as a joint venture with Warner Chappell, alongside co-founder Danny Parra, positioning Rutherford as an operator on the business and catalog-ownership side of the music industry, separate from his work as a recording artist.
Jesse Rutherford's solo catalog sits alongside a much larger body of work with The Neighbourhood, whose black-and-white visual discipline he has repeatedly cited as the direct inspiration for his solo project's rainbow-coded opposite. Readers interested in the band side of his career can consult coverage of the eleven-week chart run behind “Sweater Weather,” the band's monochrome visual language, and its 2025 return with a new label and touring cycle. The link between Rutherford and Los Angeles artist Christian Gates, via the “Dangerous State of Mind” video and the artist Aris, remains unverified beyond the two independently confirmed facts noted above and is presented here strictly as documented context rather than confirmed biography.