Sunday Conversation: Charlie Puth On Springsteen, Vulnerability, ‘Charlie’ And Growing As An Artist

The day before I jump on a Zoom with Charlie Puth he made his Howard Stern debut on Sirius. And apparently right before our conversation he was on the phone with Bruce Springsteen.

Puth is quickly becoming the pop star of the moment. But while he has the success and hype of a pop star, to call Puth a pop star is to incredibly short change his musical depth, knowledge and talent. In fact, this conversation reminds me greatly of the first interview I did with John Mayer, for the L.A. Times many years ago, where we waxed poetic for 45 minutes on Eric Clapton and supergroups like Blind Faith.

Puth, like Mayer and James Bay, brings an incredible musical understanding to accessible music. And like the two of them, Puth is well positioned to make the transition from the pop world into a career artist. His new album, Charlie, is a huge step in that transition, showcasing a new vulnerability and musical eclecticism for the talented singer/songwriter.

I spoke with Puth about Charlie, his fandom of Springsteen and how Springsteen inspired the new record, the songwriting truths he picked up from the great Carole King

Steve Baltin: Are you ready for the tour?

Charlie Puth: We’re starting in New Jersey on Sunday. I’m excited to get going on this. I call it the mini tour, the real name of it is the “One Night Only Tour.” And it’s basically just to get me warmed up for the real tour next year, but to really just get up close and personal with the fans who I feel like I haven’t seen for two years.

Baltin: Have you missed touring? I talked about this with so many people and it was a very fascinating Rorschach test for musicians. I would talk to older musicians like Ozzy Osbourne who lived their life on the road and was going crazy. And then I would talk to people like David Guetta who’s like, “I haven’t had a summer vacation with my kids in 12 years.”

Puth: Wow, I didn’t even think of it like that. Everybody has a different experience. I’m aligning myself with Ozzy’s thought process. Fun fact, I played a little bit of synthesizer on his record on a song called “Straight To Hell.” Shout out to Ozzy and Sharon, who’s a good friend of mine. I do want to get out and play for real life people again. The internet and TikTok is great, but no matter the technological advancement, there’s still nothing like playing for a real crowd.

Baltin: Are there songs from this album that you are particularly excited to see how audiences respond to them?

Puth: I believe track two called “Charlie Be Quiet!” which is, sonically, a very strange record for me. But I’m excited to see how that translates in a live scheme and also “Loser”, track seven. It’s more of an expected kind of sound from me, but I’m excited to see what that sounds like, how my voice holds up.

Baltin: Have there been songs as well then that you’ve missed playing live?

Puth: I’ve missed playing “See You Again” live because I wrote that record for my friend who is no longer here. I feel like that song would be the last message I would send to him like, “I’ll tell you all about what happened, what you missed here on Earth.” It’s been seven years since that song came out, and there’s still people who are discovering it, especially this influx of new fans that I’ve gotten from TikTok. It’s really fun to just see people react to that song. I live for people’s reactions.

Baltin: You have no control over a song. Once it goes in the world, it is not yours at all. So have there been ones that you’ve really enjoyed seeing that response?

Puth: I’ll never not be fascinated with “One Call Away” and how it’s evolved into the “stadium anthem” that it’s become. The evolution in that song and how that song has progressed in my career is mostly due in part because of how I’ve become a better performer live, and the arrangement has changed over the years as well. Originally, when I wrote it, it was very simple and I wasn’t very good at singing it. And now I’ve become downright cocky with it because the audience just screams every word along with me and I kind of approach it like, “If Phil Collins were playing it to a stadium.” I put the chorus on the piano. I make it sound very wide. It’s kind of ambiguous where it doesn’t sound too ’80s, but it’s mixed with today’s feeling a little bit. So, musically, it’s evolved, and it’s evolved on stage as well, so I’m very surprised at that.

Baltin: With a song like “One Call Away,” which was written for a friend, what makes a great song is the universality of it. That someone can hear it that you wrote for your friend and think of their friend as well.

Puth: Absolutely. When I’m making a song, the most important thing for me is for one simple sentence to spawn off 400 different thoughts for the listener. Young kids on TikTok are always like, “You went to music school and you learned jazz piano and you’re classically trained. Why do you make such simple pop music?” And the answer is, “How am I going to cast such a wide net by making avant-garde music that not everybody can grab onto?” I’ll make it a little interesting for my own interest, but popular music is about singing songs with familiarity in them and filling in the blank for people who might not be as musically experienced. Making them feel like they wrote the song with me if that makes sense.

Baltin: When you think of those artists who were really good at bringing you in by writing songs that are universal, who are those artists or those songs where you sort of appreciated that?

Puth: What’s most fascinating to me are the songs that appear to be simple, but if you choose to musically dissect them or actually some of the most complicated pieces of music, like you mentioned [John Lennon’s] “In My Life,” A major, A major, E major, F minor, A7, D major, D minor, A major, E. It’s almost like Mozart. He was writing what would be adapted into the “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” It’s actually some of the hardest piano music to perform because if you make a mistake there’s so much left up to interpretation, and it’s so open and it’s just wide open that it’s super noticeable if you make a mistake. “A Groovy Kind of Love,” by Phil Collins, which is also classically driven, written by Carole Bayer Sager. It’s the same type of thing, too, but the simplistic melody is gonna make it anthemic. I was talking about this on Howard Stern yesterday. Bruce Springsteen does that a lot in his music. There are a lot of layers that you don’t notice in “Hungry Heart” and in “Jungleland.” It just sounds like a piano part in C major, but there’s guitar ambiance in the background cleverly using the production to give it that atmospheric feel. There’s a lot of things that the common listener isn’t gonna take notice of, but maybe they’re not supposed to unless they want to.

Baltin: Springsteen, is my number-one artist of all time. So what’s the favorite Springsteen song?

Puth: It’s a tie between “Jungleland” and “Racing In The Street” for me.

Baltin: When someone is great at what they do they make it look easy, but of course, we know it’s never easy. They just make it look easy.

Puth: You said it perfectly, spoken like a true writer that you are. It’s not just musicians. It could be anybody. There’s the guy who cuts my hair. It’s easy to pick up scissors and cut a piece of hair, but like the way that you do it, you make my head look more round, I have a big head, and you make it look small. So I appreciate everybody for their talents and abilities. Bruce was telling me just before we spoke, because I was giving him props and gassing them up on the Stern show. He told me that he didn’t even write most of Greetings From Asbury Park on guitar, guitar is his instrument, but he wrote it all on piano. I found that to be astounding, so you never know where a song is gonna come from. I wrote all of these songs on this album of mine from different instruments and samples and pitching them up and down, a bit unusual.

Baltin: I interviewed James Brown, but I’ve never met Bruce. So I’m very jealous of you at this point.

Puth: He’s one of the most interesting people I’ve ever gotten to speak to. We did this New Jersey pandemic relief fund that the governor had put on, all done on Zoom of course at April, May 2020, at the very beginning of the pandemic. And I met him through the internet. I’ll never forget getting the cell phone call from the 732 area code saying, “Charlie!” I get chills just thinking about it. But I’m fine talking about Bruce because Bruce was hugely influential in the creation of this album because the way that he commands 50,000 people. I remember seeing him at Giants Stadium, but the old one before they tore it down in 2007, and he played a newer song of his at the time called “Wrecking Ball” and the way that he was able to make 50,000 people who are most likely not gonna sing on key when they’re singing by themselves, but when you put 50,000 people who sing off key together or kind of on key and it’s a mixed bag, you get this beautiful chorus backing Bruce’s voice up. That’s why I feel like so many of his fans feel like they’re on stage with him. They feel so connected with him because it’s music that is not only approachable thematically, but musically for everybody as well. So that’s how I approached making my album in a more pop music sense. I’m 30 years old and this is my third album, but I want those anthemic songs that Bruce sings at his shows. I want those at my shows as well.

Baltin What’s the one song on Charlie that you feel is most likely to have 50,000 people singing?

Puth: Even if it’s not a hit record, maybe it’s like a record that garners a cult following. There’s this song called “Tears On My Piano,” it’s track 10. And the reason why I attribute Bruce’s writing style to how I wrote that song is because there’s melody in the piano that mirrors the main melody of the chorus. So the audience of who I perform that to, they can sing along to the piano melody. I want my audience to sing along with instruments that don’t even have lyrics attached to them, so that is that song. I was definitely taking a Bruce approach when I wrote that song.

Baltin: I got to interview Ani DiFranco and I asked her what the record means to her. She’s like, “I don’t know, ask me in 20 years,” because I think a lot of times for artists it takes a minute to figure out. So are there songs on there that now surprise you?

Puth: I like that answer by Ani, ask me in 20 years. I’m going through the playlist right now. I’m a piano player and there’s very little piano on this record. Since it’s all hybrid guitars, you really can’t identify if it’s in a bass range or a guitar range. Basically, two songs have piano as the focal instrument, the backbone of the record. I have 30 pianos in that room over there, my whole thing is playing piano and on tour I have pianos, but I’m not really using them all that much. It’s really synths, so that’s always surprising to me. I wonder if in 30 years or 20 years, I’ll be approaching these songs in the same way.

Baltin: Do you feel like this record is maybe in ways more like you than anything else?

Puth: Everybody does get more comfortable with who they are as they get older. That was jump-started in the pandemic for me, I felt like I was more of an immature person when I was 29, which was a year ago. And I really do believe that the creation of this album propelled me into being a more mature, evolved version of myself. And I realized that making music and putting your feelings into art kind of propels you to the next level of you. It’s very healing in a way.

Baltin: One of the things I talked about with so many artists was also having a freedom, because typically you’re working on an album tour hamster cycle, and now all of a sudden you don’t have that thing because you can’t tour for two years. So do you feel like it allowed you to go deeper as a writer without the deadlines?

Puth: Everything you said, if I could just copy and paste it and quote it back, make it sound like I said it. Yes, it did allow me to go deeper into my songwriting and not really worry about deadlines. In a classic artist taking time off kind of way, I learned a lot about myself by talking to myself. Obviously, I couldn’t surround myself with 15 different songwriters in one room for logistical reasons. And I came to terms with a lot of things that I never wanted to put into music that I thought was overly vulnerable, it’s not cool to show your feelings. Well, I was very wrong about that. I think Carole King said one time, the number one rule in songwriting is to tell the truth, and there were times where I was putting up a little bit of a front and making myself seem a lot cooler than I actually am. Now I’m perceived as cool and I’m just acting myself and owning myself.

Baltin: I think the more honest you are the more people identify with it.

Puth: I can’t walk anywhere on the street anymore, and people seem to care about what’s going on in my life which was never the case before. When I started, it was really about just getting the radio single out, just getting the catchy song out. Now people care about my project. So in that respect, I feel like a new artist. It’s a very exciting time for me right now.

Baltin: What do you want people to take from Charlie when they hear this as a full album? And maybe you can’t answer that for 20 years.

Puth: I want people rather than to praise me for being a musician in the spotlight and thinking, “Oh, I’ll never be in his position. He’s this famous singer.” I was hoping that I could have someone to look up to 11 years ago when I was making videos on YouTube. And I hope anybody who’s making music or are doing anything, I hope that they can listen to this album and know that they can live their life and put art up against it and make something really interesting that people want to hear.