Within the first few minutes of sitting down for drinks with Charlie Puth at the Hotel Bel-Air, he has: complimented my cologne, claiming to have worn it for awhile himself; decided my nail polish and sunglasses must mean I’m the “epitome of cool”; and, after noting my Jazmine Sullivan shirt, declared his love for her acclaimed album Reality Show. And it all feels genuine. Today he’s wearing baggy denim jeans, a white tank top, and an unbuttoned mesh green shirt that he describes as exactly how his mom dressed in the ‘90s. “She’s the coolest person ever,” he beams, unbothered by coming off as saccharine. This is all in sync with his online persona, which, sure, involves the usual 2022-pop-star fare of asking fans to stream your song till you reach #1 on Billboard, and a healthy TikTok presence, but also above-average doses of healthy, hilariously-blatant horniness (we all know what he sounds like moaning now). Every interaction with Puth, whether it be online or in person, makes you believe that you two could be best friends. “I’m trying to be the anti-celebrity,” he says earnestly, and gratefully: an open dialogue with his fans is what steered him out of a career skid, in which he almost lost his grip on what Charlie Puth Music should be.
The first fan to tell him he’d lost his way was actually an idol. In December 2020, he was at the scene-y, paparazzi-flanked Craig’s in West Hollywood when owner Craig Susser popped over to ask Puth if he wanted to meet Elton John. “I say, ‘Hell yeah, I wanna meet Elton John,’” Puth recalls. John gave Puth a swift “Hello,” and jumped straight to the point: He was a fan of Puth’s second album, Voicenotes, but, he said, “I gotta be honest with you, these three songs you’ve put out—they sound nothing like the music that you put together so beautifully on your second album. I think you’re involving too many people in your music.”
John was referring to the trio of songs “I Warned Myself,” “Cheating on You,” and “Mother,” which Puth released in 2019. They came off as an attempt to create a new “bad boy” identity for himself, an aloof cool guy who hit it and quit it. But Puth is not a bad boy—the songs were giving Sandra-Dee-at-the-end-of-Grease vibes. At that point, it seemed Puth was always in perennial album rollout mode, dropping one new, uneventful single after another while promising an elusive album was forthcoming. Even before the chance encounter with Elton John, Puth had been getting direct messages from fans saying stuff like: “Are you sure you’re hanging with the right crowd? Your music sounds different now, it sounds like you’re trying to be this cool guy. You're not a cool guy, you're a dork and you use aspects of humor in your music. It sounds like you're taking yourself too seriously.”
He had been deleting those messages, before ignoring them altogether, but John’s comments made him realize these fans weren’t being annoying, they were being truthful. He says he’s since apologized to them, some of them personally in DMs. “They’ve never even met me in real life before. It’s a really powerful thing that music can do. It’s overwhelming just saying it out loud.”
Puth was a classic case of a singer-turned-massive-pop-star lost in the sauce of Hollywood celebrity, and all the affectations it entails, such as Yes Men (“I was surrounding myself with a bunch of people gassing me up, but it was all kinda just to maybe be around me in some weird way. I’m not friends with any of those people anymore”) and an industry that rewards formula over creativity. Which is to say, everyone just wanted a dozen more songs like “See You Again” (Puth’s Fast and Furious mega-hit with Wiz Khalifa that took on greater resonance with Paul Walker’s passing.) Puth’s journey back to creativity was to get personal, and for the first time, he had something personal to write about.
The result is Charlie, his most vulnerable and honest album—mostly because it’s a breakup album. Puth keeps most of his private life exactly that, and hasn’t publicly confirmed that Charlie is about his rumored relationship and subsequent 2019 breakup with singer Charlotte Lawrence. The only thing he’s been public about is that he’d never seriously dated prior to this split breakup, and that’s why the pain is so real. Suddenly, someone who once used to write about not being able to fall in love found himself reeling from heartbreak.
Charlie goes through all five stages of grief in 32 minutes. “Heartbreak is universal. Everyone ultimately is going to experience it. Maybe not even in a relationship. In some way, shape or form you will have your heart broken.” Which, duh. It’s a little like hearing your younger sibling work their way through their high-school crush not like-liking them back. But this has all been an epiphany to Puth, and his emotion around it is so heartfelt that you feel for him, regardless of how late he is to the pity party. “When people listen to this album, I want them to know that you, yourself, can be responsible for the healing,” he says. “You can go to therapy and you can surround yourself with friends who will gas you up and make you feel better. But I think that is temporary feel-goodness. You yourself can make yourself feel better. Because I was going through such a tough time for two years, and this music is, uh, the thing that healed me. And I was the one who made it. I made my own Band-Aid. And I just want people to know that they're capable of so much.”
If he sounds like he’s writing the first chapter to a self-help book most people have already read, it’s probably because he was busy making music his entire life instead of falling in love like a character that only exists in rom-coms. “I maybe would've preferred it to happen a bit earlier, maybe in my teenage years. But maybe I was supposed to be learning how to make music when I was 17.” He admits now that he was lying on most of his earlier albums, with songs like “Marvin Gaye,” a painful retro duet with Meghan Trainor that attempts to conjure chemistry between them, or “Dangerously,” a song about how detrimental obsessively loving someone was to his own health, despite now fessing up he’d never been in love at that age. “It was, like, 45 percent truth.” Aside from a couple songs with direct-life anecdotes (“Attention” and “We Don’t Talk Anymore,” coincidentally his two highest charting singles as lead artist), he describes his previous two albums as “checking boxes for the music industry.”
Though he’s described the two years post breakup as the worst time of his life, the irony is the album isn’t Puth doing some Adele post-divorce impersonation—it’s an upbeat, synthy, ‘80s pop album. “[Charlie] totally is a breakup album,” he says. “And the major dichotomy, the elephant in the room, is that the music is almost joyful. There's almost like bits of humor sprinkled in throughout the entire album. They have a bright, lush sense like my stuff usually does.” If Puth’s previous albums are full of sexual bravado, this album is full-hearted and comic. In one song (“Charlie Be Quiet!”) he has Hamlet-esque battles with his inner monologue about how talking too much will turn women off. In another (“Tears on my Piano”), he mocks himself for only having sung sad songs on the album. All of the misery is kept somewhat tongue-in-cheek, over the sounds of exceptionally cheerful Springsteen-esque stadium concert guitar riffs and drums. It’s musical Lexapro.
The other natural side-effect of a breakup is you become preoccupied with thinking about when you’ll get laid again, which is perhaps one reason why Puth’s social media presence has become incredibly raunchy: during the pandemic, he became notable for ascending to new levels of public horniness. In between his how-to videos on music chords and notes, his feeds are a flood of dirty jokes, shirtless, blatant thirst traps, videos of himself working out, or just straight-up zooms into his crotch as he wears underwear that leaves little to the imagination. If you don't know what his body looks like, then you haven't been on social media the past two years.
"I am very horny,” Puth admits. “All the time."
But he insists it’s really just about showing off the hard (and costly: "These gym sessions are expensive in LA!") work that went into achieving his dream figure. He maintains that he doesn’t post them "to antagonize anybody."
He's referring to a growing suspicion among his fans that he's gaybaiting—posting sexually explicit content in order to attract a gay male audience, despite identifying as straight. He denies playing games: If anything, he admits he's used the queer community for inspiration in his music. He drives through West Hollywood every day, and one time, when he was listening to a song he was working on and “half-happy with,” he passed the WeHo gay clubs Pump and The Abbey, “and everybody was out dancing to something that's not being played on the radio.”
“I think LGBTQ+ culture is so ahead of its time, culturally, sonically, musically, everything-ly,” he adds, “that when I had a less than perfect song at the studio and I was by myself and I saw everybody having a great time, I literally heard a different song in my head. I rearranged the whole thing, I drove back to the studio, I was so inspired." That song, he says, eventually became "Loser" on Charlie.
“Loser” is reminiscent of the catchy 2000s pop songs you hear pulsating from WeHo these days with a chorus that rhymes “loser” with “lose her.” And like songs from that period, it even has a soaring bridge which most pop songs have all but abandoned in favor of two minute songs. But like the rest of Charlie, it also goes back to the 80s pop sensibility. But the album’s sound wasn’t Puth trying to rip off some of his favorite songs from that era. “It wasn't exactly listening to a bunch of '80s music and then wanting to make an '80s alt rock, alt synth, whatever album.” The album’s sound was inspired by, if not a straight-up homage, to his mom—his pop-culture muse and the music she used to skate to at a new Jersey roller rink, like Madonna’s 1985 single “Into the Groove,” which inspired Puth’s “There’s A First Time For Everything.” “I wanted to [recapture] the feeling that it gave people in 1985 when they first heard that song,” he says. “I was just thinking of a bunch of scenarios where music could be played in the background.” Puth is absolutely at his most charming when discussing music, his favorite artists, and recalling random pop-culture trivia. His fans had him pegged. He’s not cool and he is a dork. Who else would excitedly talk about how his love of pop culture came from devouring Access Hollywood, Howard Stern, and The Naked Gun with his mom? Or using his perfect pitch to resemble everyday sounds on TikTok?
Fully showing and embracing his real self is Puth’s key to building his relationship with his fans. He’s inspired by Nicki Minaj and the devotion she gets from her fans, the Barbz, who recently propelled her new single, “Super Freaky Girl,” to #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. “The Barbz will kill for her. And the reason why the Barbz will kill for her is because they've been with her for 10-plus, 15 years.”
Puth says this as a member of the Barbz. Puth admitted recently that he was a “massive” Minaj fan on,and when Minaj responded, “Thank you Charlie, I love your voice,” Puth was in nirvana. “I don’t melt for many people, but I melted like chocolate in a hot car.”
“I've always loved Nicki,’ he continues. “I remember in the early days of Twitter, hearing that this new artist Nicki Minaj sold a million copies of her mixtape by herself and got signed to Cash Money. I was so enamored with the fact that you could do something on your own and then transfer all that success to a major label and then I heard”—he grins and sings the chorus of Minaj’s “Your Love”—“and I was like, who the fuck produced this? It had that foul ass 808 in it and Nicki was singing and rapping at the same time.”
In an age where celebrity drives less popularity than a devoted fan base who will support you and keep you honest, Puth is happy with the repudiation of who he was before. Becoming the anti-celebrity, as he called it. Perhaps it’s also spurred by his obsession with communicating with fans via TikTok, which he thinks has made people more vulnerable. “I mean, when you scroll, [you can find] someone crying about something. And I say that kind of insensitively, but, like, sometimes it's a three-minute, heartwarming story about someone trying to find a parent that they've lost touch with for over 20 years.” Heartfelt and honest, that’s the Puth he wants his fans to know.
But you can be heartfelt and honest while still being a goof-horndog. Toward the end of our time together, he opens TikTok on his phone and explains: “The For You page is really indicative of your personality. I've seen my friends’ pages who love food and it's every chef, like, commenting on every hot restaurant to go to. This is what pops up on my For You page.”
He turns around his phone to show me the first video that his algorithm has selected for him: It’s someone purchasing items from a cashier at a grocery store: “If you couldn't tell,” he says, pointing to their groceries. “That's a giant cucumber, and a bottle of Vaseline, and some condoms.”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Callum Walker Hutchinson
Styled by Brandon Tan
Grooming by Darcy Gilmore at The Wall Group using Balmain Hair Couture
Tailoring by Yelena Travkina
