Puth confirms Manila concert
After revealing his highlyanticipated Asian tour on social media, US pop star and awardwinning songwriter Charlie Puth confirms his return to Manila for The Voicenotes Tour at the Mall of Asia Arena on Nov. 6.
Concert promoters Live Nation and MMI Live have also announced that tickets to the concert will be available at all SM tickets outlets on July 17, 10 a.m.
Puth last came to the Philippines in August 2016 and wowed thousands of his Filipino fans with the four multi-platinum hits, One Call Away, Marvin Gaye and We Don’t Talk Anymore from his platinum-selling, Top 10 debut album, Nine Track Mind, as well as his breakout hit See You Again — the best-selling song of 2015 that spent 12 weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100, earned him three Grammy nominations (including Song of the Year), a Golden Globe nomination and 9x-platinum certification in the US.
But the New Jersey-born singer, songwriter, musician and producer was also eager to prove himself artistically when it came to making his second album, Voicenotes, named after the trusty iPhone app he uses to collect his musical ideas. Puth co-wrote every song and recorded and produced the album entirely by himself (barring one song he co-produced with Max Martin) at his home studio in Los Angeles.
On the lyrical front, Voicenotes is an album that is largely about Puth’s struggle to find a normal relationship when his own life has hardly been normal since finding multiplatinum success. “I wanted it to be a story of my travels from the East Coast to the West Coast and how my growing fame has affected my mind in good and bad ways,” he says.
The first three singles — Attention, How Long and Done For Me featuring Kehlani — cover that territory. “Whenever I met anybody, they often knew more about me than I knew about myself,” he says. “I’d never dealt with anything like that before.”
Songs like LA Girls, Like A Boy and Slow It Down detail different aspects of the rarified life of someone who feels like he should be enjoying the glittering lifestyle of fabulous parties and ample romantic opportunities, but just doesn’t — something Puth addresses on the self-acceptance anthem The Way I Am, which opens with the following lines: “Maybe I’m a get a little anxious / Maybe I’m a get a little shy / Cuz everybody’s trying to be famous / And I’m just trying to find a place to hide.”
Audiences have embraced Puth’s bold new direction. Attention, which the New York Times pop critic Jon Caramanica listed fourth on his year-end list of Best Songs of 2017, climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 (Puth’s highestcharting single as a solo artist), hit No. 1 on both the Top 40 and Hot AC radio charts, and his being certified 3x-platinum, while the funky, cheating-ex song How Long hit No. 3 at Top 40 radio and has been certified platinum.
For all his success, Puth still sees himself as the kid from Rumson who played organ in church and made mixtapes for the girls at school. “I still have the same deep infatuation with chord changes, girls and food,” he says. “Nothing’s really changed. I still find myself to be a pretty humble guy. Every room I walk into, I think, I’m the worst songwriter and I have to prove myself. But it’s because of that that I get better.”