On a current Friday morning, Charlie Puth sat in a inexperienced room at Spotify’s Los Angeles headquarters, sipping a can of La Croix as he contemplated which was extra more likely to drop first: his new report or his first baby.
“It’s quite possible it could be the same week,” he mentioned.
Turns out the child beat the music.
Puth announced on social media Monday that his spouse, Brooke Sansone, had given delivery to a child boy, Jude, on March 13 — which made it an excellent factor that the 34-year-old pop singer had pushed down from the couple’s dwelling in Santa Barbara early this month for a busy day of album promo earlier than activating Dad Mode for some time.
Due Friday, “Whatever’s Clever!” is Puth’s fourth LP since he broke out in 2015 with “See You Again,” his 14-times-platinum collaboration with the rapper Wiz Khalifa from the “Fast and Furious” film franchise. Yet he says it’s the primary one “where things are lining up musically in my life — like I’m living what the album is about.”
In “Changes,” the album’s opener, Puth anticipates the arrival of “new directions and lessons,” whereas “Home” rhymes “rose-colored lenses” with “white picket fences”; different tracks ponder his relationships together with his dad and his youthful brother and look again to his upbringing in suburban New Jersey.
When he was youthful, Puth mentioned, he believed an artist was imagined to separate his life from his profession. “Picture a hard drive,” mentioned the singer, a graduate of each the Manhattan School of Music and Berklee College of Music. “One partition is your life, and you keep that private. The other partition is your career — that’s where you dye your hair a different color and you speak a little bit differently because you’re an artist.” He shook his head.
“My wife was the person who told me, ‘You just need to be you,’” he mentioned, although he additionally credit Taylor Swift for altering his pondering when she shouted him out by identify within the title observe of 2024’s “The Tortured Poets Department.”
For the glistening, crisply detailed sound of “Whatever’s Clever!,” which the singer co-produced with BloodPop (identified for his work with Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga), Puth took inspiration from classic yacht rock and blue-eyed soul; company on the LP embody Kenny Loggins, Michael McDonald and Kenny G, the final of whom accompanied the singer as he carried out the nationwide anthem ultimately month’s Super Bowl LX.
“He’s an amazingly talented guy,” McDonald says of Puth, whom the Doobie Brothers frontman had been keen to write down with since a mutual good friend steered it some time again. “But I didn’t want to cold-call him out of the blue in case he wasn’t into it. So when Kenny [Loggins] called me about this situation, I jumped at the chance.”
Together the three got here up with “Love in Exile,” a buoyant, falsetto-filled quantity with welcome echoes of the Doobies’ “What a Fool Believes,” which McDonald and Loggins co-wrote half a century in the past.
Coco Jones, who additionally seems on the album — the 2 sing a slinky duet referred to as “Sideways” — says Puth impressed her together with his deep data of R&B historical past.
“There were some references where I was like, ‘What even is that?’” she recollects with amusing.
Puth put his chops on show late final yr with a sequence of intimate gigs on the Blue Note jazz golf equipment in New York and L.A., the place he tastily retooled his personal materials and did covers like “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and New Edition’s “Can You Stand the Rain.” Next month he’ll take “Whatever’s Clever!” on the street for a world tour set to cease at Inglewood’s Kia Forum on April 29.
Said Puth in our interview as a video crew prepped for a shoot: “There’s never been so many things happening all at once for me.”
I’ve loved your look throughout this album rollout: the denims, the sweaters, the penny loafers.
It jogs my memory of once I went to Catholic college and you’d go purchasing for college garments on the Bass outlet and they’d have partitions and partitions of penny loafers. I needed the report to really feel like while you’d open up your textbook and discover obscene drawings and issues that children wrote 10 years prior.
Gimme among the particular touchstones. You’ve talked about Phil Collins and Philip Bailey. I hear Fine Young Cannibals as nicely.
Absolutely.
Time-wise, you had been pondering, what, 1984 to 1989?
’89 to ’90 — ’92 possibly.
I love the specificity.
Looking again, it appears from a technological standpoint that we had been in a very essential transitional time going into the ’90s. When you heard “Vogue” by Madonna for the primary time — the driving rhythm of the 909 [drum machine] — you weren’t listening to that 5 years prior. Then you’d hear the “Bodyguard” soundtrack — “I’m Every Woman,” Whitney Houston. Everything felt very dance-y. Chicago home was actually beginning to soften its method into pop. It wasn’t so underground anymore, and that’s all as a result of the expertise received higher.
Charlie Puth performs the nationwide anthem with Kenny G throughout final month’s Super Bowl LX at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif.
(Focus On Sport / Getty Images)
The dialed-in-ness of the sounds jogs my memory of John Mayer’s “Sob Rock.”
I’ve by no means been an individual to brazenly present every little thing — I would like to cover behind the music. “Hides” isn’t the very best phrase, however there must be some chords — possibly some completely happy chords — to offset the actually severe subject within the background. That’s a juxtaposition I’ll generally hear in John’s music as nicely. Listen to [my song] “Washed Up.” That’s a track a few heavy subject — organizing an intervention for one in every of your greatest associates. But there’s trumpets on the report that just about sound like the start of “Wheel of Fortune.”
“Washed Up” made me consider “Stop” by the Spice Girls.
Same key. C main is a really completely happy key.
Also tremendous dialed: Justin Bieber’s “Swag.”
There’s a report on there referred to as “All I Can Take” with the swingy Lisa Stansfield “All Around the World” drums. I don’t know if that’s what he and Dijon had been listening to after they had been making it, however I’m simply glad I’m listening to that in a famous person’s music.
Tell me about that includes Kenny G on “Cry.” Here’s a man with a whole lot of layered associations.
There’s some comedy there.
What did you need to say by bringing him in?
I needed to not present the humorous facet. Because he’s so multifaceted, he can present up in an Andy Samberg video or he can go onstage with the Jonas Brothers and carry out “My Heart Will Go On,” which is possibly a bit of bit on the nostril. But I needed to faucet into the Kenny G that was launched to the world within the late ’80s earlier than the vacation albums blew up.
How’d you strategy him?
BloodPop and I discovered a track on one in every of his albums the place it’s simply him enjoying the saxophone — no pads, no piano, simply him — and we put it into Melodyne and made the melody that I needed him to play on the solo. It didn’t sound nice — it gave the impression of a demo that you just’d give to a musician in hopes that they’d beat it. And he did simply that.
I puzzled whether or not you felt the necessity to let him know you weren’t seeking to have him as a joke.
I performed him the album — I believe he was in a position to inform it was an actual factor simply by listening to the heat of the chords.
Is the respect of a Kenny G or a Michael McDonald or a Kenny Loggins — of an elder, let’s say — is that essential to you?
It is as a result of they’re an enormous cause why I even made this album. You can’t make an album like this and not have the blokes that invented it. I need to re-create an expertise for youths who may not be aware of their catalog — to really feel how their mother and father felt after they heard “What a Fool Believes.”
There’s a pressure on the report, although, proper? At the identical time that you just’re embracing the OGs, you could have a track referred to as “Don’t Meet Your Heroes.” Who’s that track about?
I can’t say.
How do you resolve that contradiction?
These are heroes I’m completely happy I met. When you write a track with Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins, you understand they’re similar to you — they’re songwriters. They don’t have an outdated strategy. I’m assured I might stroll within the studio with them and write a track for an artist at present — a track for Dua Lipa, a track for Zara Larsson. Listen to Olivia Dean, “Man I Need.” She’s not beginning on only a D-flat-major chord. She’s beginning on a D-flat with an F.
You’re saying that’s a contemporary track with these silky yacht rock chords.
I believe silk is in.
Your track with Coco Jones may be the silkiest factor you’ve ever performed.
I’d agree with that. That piano is known as the Dig EP from the Roland JV-1080 — the preset that Babyface used on the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack.
You and Coco are actually pushing one another vocally.
I don’t attempt and out-sing the visitor. Coco got here in and needed to be on the airport in two hours for a red-eye to New York. She knew the entire track just like the again of her hand.
Back to “Don’t Meet Your Heroes”: How cautious had been you to not reveal who it’s about?
I simply didn’t suppose that’s what the track referred to as for. It’s a really particular expertise that occurred to me that truly may not be so particular. People have appeared as much as someone in no matter area they’re in and labored arduous to fulfill that particular person. Then it seems it’s disappointing — you want you possibly can reverse time and glue to the spot the place you didn’t know them so nicely. It sucks as a result of then while you hearken to their music otherwise you watch their motion pictures, the expertise is tainted. They may nonetheless be very proficient, however it’s simply not what it was.
The album closes with “I Used to Be Cringe,” and I hear what you’re saying. But if I nonetheless love your previous track “Boy,” does that imply I’m cringe?
I don’t suppose “Boy” is cringe. Maybe the instance you’re searching for is “Marvin Gaye,” from the primary album.
Charlie Puth and his spouse, Brooke Sansone, on the seventy fifth Primetime Emmy Awards in 2024.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
What does it imply for a fan when an artist seems again at their previous stuff and says, “I’m not really rocking with this anymore”?
I’m going over the set record for this tour, and my [music director] mentioned, “Are we doing ‘Marvin Gaye’?” I used to be like, “I don’t want to do it in the doo-wop kind of Motown way.” I’m not in the identical place in 2026 — about to be a dad, blah-blah-blah — that I used to be once I wrote that track. I’m not saying to my spouse, “Let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on.” But I believe there’s a option to make everyone completely happy musically, and it’s all within the association. I can take the important thing down, or I cannot use that particular drum sample. Maybe the problem is: How do I play “Washed Up” and go into “Marvin Gaye”?
Your Blue Note present made me suppose a bit in regards to the racial politics of blue-eyed soul: the well-known white man singing R&B whereas backed by a band of expert Black gamers. How do you concentrate on the sophisticated historical past of this music?
I don’t faux I invented it. I’m not strolling round like, “Look at me — I invented water.” If we’re gonna go actually deep, I didn’t even invent the music that I wrote — possibly it was written hundreds of thousands of years in the past, and I’m simply tapping into one thing. That’s most likely a dialog for an additional time.
Save it for Joe Rogan.
I don’t suppose I’m going on Joe Rogan. But that’s an actual factor, what you mentioned. And I believe it’s actually essential to pay homage. I examine music each evening, and I’ve the privilege of calling somebody like Babyface and simply flat-out asking him, “How did you write ‘Whip Appeal’?” He says, “Well, I listened to El DeBarge, ‘Time Will Reveal’ — whatever that diminished C chord is — and that’s where that inspiration came from.” OK, nicely, what was El DeBarge listening to? And on and on and on. That method, if I’m ever requested the query, I’ve all of the information. I like the information.
You’ve been one thing of a connoisseur’s fave, I believe it’s honest to say, which is why the Taylor Swift lyric was such a delight: “We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.”
I’ve by no means spoken to her about it — in the future I’ll — however she does such an excellent job of opening up in her music, and I do imagine in some respect that was her telling me, “There’s more things to talk about in music, Charlie — maybe you should dig a little bit.”
What had been the stuff you stored speaking about as an alternative of digging?
Relationship songs about issues that ended years in the past. I’m grateful for these songs — they’re why I’m right here speaking to you now. But I’d by no means written in regards to the relationship I’ve with my dad. I wrote “Cry” every week previous to his mother passing. Seeing my dad in an emotional state that I hadn’t seen him in so overtly in my 34 years of life — I needed to consolation him, and there was a option to accomplish that musically. That needed to be a track.
If this report succeeds in shifting you out of the realm of the true heads —
That’s very good, by the best way.
What will that imply for Charlie Puth?
I assume I’d wish to be not fairly as underrated — possibly even, dare I say, to be overrated.
