3 hours ago
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Ionly realise it as I’m saying it: I’ve fumblingly told Charlie Puth, straight to his face, that he’s supremely uncool. Even if the Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter is self-aware enough about his public persona, no one wants to hear such information so blatantly.
On his fantastically unhip new album Whatever’s Clever!, the 34-year-old goes full cringe in the best way possible. On Cry, Puth enlists his buddy Kenny G for a dramatically smooth sax solo. Love in Exile is a yacht rock song featuring the genre’s soft-rockin’ stalwarts, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins. Standout single Changes has Puth himself laying down a Bruce Hornsby-style piano solo over a blue-eyed gospel choir. The album features more slap bass than a Seinfeld marathon. It all sounds like the closing credits of an ’80s cop comedy.
Even aesthetically, Puth has leaned into the period’s prevailing dagginess. In videos and press shots, he’s been rockin’ blue jeans with sneakers, a tie, and a tucked-in button-up. He’s out here looking like cousin Larry from Perfect Strangers, or Paul Simon in the You Can Call Me Al video.
I love it wholeheartedly, but why would someone do this? Why align yourself with sounds and signifiers that have been perennially ridiculed, or at best embraced with an ironic remove? Take yacht rock, for example: too slick, middle-aged and unrelentingly smooth to ever be cool, even if we can all agree that, say, Michael McDonald’s I Keep Forgettin’ (Every Time You’re Near) is an objectively wonderful song. I ask Puth: Do you identify with something in that?
“With what? Wait, what are you asking me?” he replies, his scarred eyebrow arched. It occurs to me that I’ve essentially asked Puth if he feels that, much like yacht rock, his utter squareness has denied him his proper due in his time. It seemed like a fair question in my head.
Fortunately, it’s a topic Puth raises himself on the closer to Whatever’s Clever!, I Used to Be Cringe, a song that dismantles his former pop star ambition. “I used to lie, say I was taller/ and throw words around like ‘baller’... Tried so hard, it actually made me cry,” he sings, practically disowning earlier iterations of himself, including the Charlie who co-wrote, produced, and featured on Wiz Khalifa’s chart-topping See You Again (2015) and The Kid Laroi and Justin Bieber’s Stay (2021).
“I wouldn’t say disowning,” says Puth. “I’m really happy for those versions of myself, it was just a part of growing up. When I wrote I Used to Be Cringe, it was simply me reflecting on the times where I wasn’t truly honest with myself, where I put up a front and tried to be somebody I wasn’t just in hopes of people liking me, when all I had to do was just be myself.”
Whatever’s Clever! shows Puth firmly on the other side of that transition. In 2024, he married his partner Brooke Sansone; the couple welcomed their first child, Jude, last month, which might explain why Puth is suddenly dressing like Ted Danson in Three Men and a Baby.
He’s in full married dad mode. “Oh yeah, and this is the soundtrack to that,” he says. “When I got married to my wife Brooke, I knew I wasn’t going to be dying my hair anymore, or talking differently in interviews, or hanging around with people that weren’t good for me. That’s what it took to get me out of that world.”
The question of whether “Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist” has followed Puth ever since Taylor Swift (and her then paramour, Matty Healy of The 1975) voiced that exact query on the title track of her 2024 album, The Tortured Poets Department. An appreciative shoutout from a generation’s most beloved songwriter should be validating, but Puth also read a challenge in it: if he “should” be bigger, why wasn’t he?
“I thought it was a really nice gesture in a really beautiful song that she had written with Jack Antonoff,” says Puth. “I took it as a compliment and as a suggestion to maybe be a bit more honest in my music. She’s mastered that art, so I definitely took it as an inspirational cue. I looked at it as a different songwriter’s door that I could open. That’s where that led me to.”
Don’t Meet Your Heroes, a kiss-off to an unnamed idol that would spark internet chatter if anyone cared about Puth’s industry feuds, feels in line with Swift’s Easter egg-y approach. “People can wonder who that song’s about, but it really doesn’t matter. That’s for me,” he says. “This album isn’t about, ‘Oh, I hope that radio station X, Y and Z plays this.’ I want people to hear the songs and realise that even if every experience [I write about] is unique to me, we all end up going through similar things.”
Puth is sitting in front of a multiscreen setup in his home studio in Los Angeles when we speak, surrounded by keyboards and pianos. His fans (“Puthinators”) might recognise it as the backdrop for his “Professor Puth” TikTok clips, where the musician – a scholarship graduate of Boston’s prestigious Berklee College of Music (he’s classically trained in piano since 4 and in jazz since 10) – conducts mini masterclasses breaking down concepts like “boom bap” or “distortion” for his followers.
Last month, he was announced as the chief music officer at ethical AI company Moises – a potentially controversial move at a time when the mere suggestion of AI use sparks a visceral response in music lovers. Puth is quick to outline his principles: he signed on with Moises because it’s the only AI company he’d seen that “put human-made music first”, he says.
“Remember Guitar Hero? It’s a fun game, but you spend all that time learning how to play a guitar on Guitar Hero when you could pick up an actual guitar and learn how to play it. I would rather see someone pick up an actual instrument and learn how to play it. My issue with some of these AI companies is they’re not being used as a tool; they’re being used as a quick fix to just make something,” he says. “That’s why music doesn’t hit the way it used to, because music is supposed to be human-made. The creation of music is supposed to have an emotional exchange that AI cannot ever replicate.”
He highlights an example of how he’d use it. “Let’s say I’m backstage. I have five minutes until I’m about to go on stage, but I can’t get this song out of my head. I will play a Rhodes part, and then I can generate suggested rhythms that I can show my drummer and be like, ‘Can you play something like this?’ and then he can come back after the show and play that groove. It’s just a quicker way to get the demo out of my head and into my bandmates’ ears. That’s ethical AI to me. I dislike the idea of typing in a prompt and then music comes out. That’s lazy to me.”
Despite his company title, Puth admits the use of AI in music is still a complex issue. “It’s a brand new thing and I do think that it can threaten working musicians. That’s why it’s important to push human-made music first… Because there’s a lot of people who are getting discouraged from pursuing music as a career, and I want to be the voice for them.”
Charlie Puth’s Whatever’s Clever! is out now.
