Charlie Puth starts again
‘ Voicenotes feels like my debut album.’
Now that Charlie Puth has your attention, he’s ready to show you what else he’s got.
Last spring, the piano-playing crooner surprised fans and critics with his funk-infused Attention, a bass-heavy middle finger to a two-faced ex that climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. It’s a far cry from the blueeyed soul that characterized early hits
One Call Away and Marvin Gaye featuring Meghan Trainor, taken off his 2016 debut, Nine Track Mind.
“I’m glad people are finally hearing the real me,” says Puth, 26. “This isn’t the story of how I got hooked up with some cooler producer. I always had this music in me — it was just a matter of executing it.”
Attention is the first single from Puth’s long-delayed sophomore effort, Voicenotes, out now, named quite literally for the phone app he uses to make demos. The album was written and recorded over the past year and a half during his solo headlining tour and North American trek with buddy Shawn Mendes. Puth handled much of the 13 songs’ production himself.
The experience couldn’t be more different from that of Nine Track Mind, which he says he was forced by label execs to rush-release to capitalize on the success of See You Again, his Furious 7 smash with Wiz Khalifa. That song spent 12 non-consecutive weeks atop the Hot 100 in summer 2015, tying Eminem’s Lose Yourself for the longest-running No. 1 rap single in history. Critics weren’t kind to the album, writing that Puth “feels stage-managed” and his “anonymity is infuriating.”
“I agree with all of those critiques, because it’s true,” Puth says. When See
You Again was released, he was better known as a songwriter: “I wasn’t planning on being an artist. I had to figure out my artist career in front of millions of people while we had the biggest song in the past decade. ... Now, Voicenotes feels like my debut album.”
Voicenotes takes sonic cues from late ’80s R&B artists such as Babyface and Teddy Riley, and it even includes a feature from Boyz II Men on a cappella ballad If You Leave Me Now. His lyrics frankly recount heartbreak and the perils of being in the spotlight. LA Girls, for instance, is about “how fame almost changed me. I spent a couple of years thinking I had to have a certain personality to be the ‘perfect male pop singer.’ ”
When he’s not in the studio, Puth says he hangs out with his best friend, Adam Levine, at home in Los Angeles and enjoys old-school hip-hop including MC Lyte and Naughty by Nature (who hail from his native New Jersey). Asked if he would ever rap on a song like his pop peers Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran, he jokingly declines.
“I’ve found out in my career that no one wants to see me dance, because I can’t dance for (expletive),” Puth says, “and no one wants to see me rap.”