This explains why several of Puth’s songs, including the punchy, thumping “Light Switch,” go viral months before their proper release. Given Puth’s impressive catalog, fans will certainly be in for a killer show during The Charlie Live Experience Tour, his first tour in four years.
We caught up with Puth before the North Texas stop on the tour, which will take place on May 24, at The Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory. While in town, he’s looking forward to grabbing some Whataburger.
“I always get the double cheeseburger with no tomato,” he says. “And I always ask them to double-fry the fries, which you can do if they’re not busy.”
The number of possible combinations at Whataburger seems overwhelming, but so are the many ways to go viral on the internet these days. Over the course of his decade-plus-long career, Puth has seen the music and internet landscapes evolve rapidly. He got his start recording acoustic covers and uploading videos to YouTube.
As streaming and TikTok become more vital to music discovery, maintaining an online presence, says Puth, is exhausting, but more necessary now than ever before.
“You can't dive headfirst into the quicksand of the internet,” says Puth. “You have to make your content — whatever you do, make your music, paint your pictures — and make it interesting to the online. The internet is the outlet for it all. If I spend a couple of hours making a song that I know my fans might enjoy seeing the process of making, I'll upload it and then not look at anything else for the rest of the day. Because you'll almost become less creative if you just wonder what hundreds and thousands of people are doing.”
Puth’s TikToks have become an essential part of his creative process as his fans build up anticipation for his projects. The singer's followers get to see him as he writes a song at his piano, or as he builds an instrumental on Pro Tools. He prefers not to use any form of Musical Instrument Digital Interface, as he prefers to work with physical instruments, on songs for himself and for other artists.
Puth takes inspiration from a variety of sounds, and says that even when he’s recording songs for himself, he often channels the stylings of other artists. When he first signed his deal with Atlantic Records and Artist Partner Group in 2015, he was signed as a songwriter, crafting melodies and lyrics for artists such as Jhené Aiko and Trey Songz.
“I wrote ‘We Don't Talk Anymore’ thinking about a different artist, I wrote ‘See You Again; thinking about a different artist,” says Puth. “I very rarely think about myself when I'm making these records and that pushes me to new grounds in some way.”
Viewers will get a deeper look at Puth’s creative process on his upcoming unscripted Roku show, which is tentatively titled Charlie Makes a Record. He can’t tell us much about it right now, but promises that it will be a gift for those who enjoy watching his TikToks.
“It’s everything you see me do on the internet,” says Puth. “It’s going to be just that, but stretched out to 28-minute episodes, [with viewers] just following my day, and seeing how may day is affected by sounds around me.”
Although the internet has been a vital tool in his creative process, it has also been a source of backlash for him. Back in March, Puth shared, then quickly deleted, a tweet reading “Attention is about what you think it’s about,” alluding to his 2017 single, “Attention.” This led fans to find an interview Puth did with Genius around that time, in which he alluded to the song’s subject, saying “We would be talking in the hotel, she’d be like, ‘You wanna sleep over?’ I’d be like, ‘Yes, I’m gonna get it in!’ And then nothing would happen — which is totally fine, but after like the fifth time of that happening, I knew what she was doing.”
The woman in question has long been rumored to be Grand Prairie native singer, Selena Gomez. Puth's tweet seemed to all but confirm that, which led to Twitter users labeling him as “entitled” and “misogynistic."
Last year, other fans accused Puth of queerbaiting after he posted a series of nude pictures on social media to promote Charlie.
Though he doesn’t address either of these situations in our interview (and declined to comment whether he was referencing Gomez in the song and tweet), Puth says he doesn’t get as emotionally invested in online backlash as he used to.
“Sometimes people do offer good critiques,” he says, “But I take everything with a grain of salt.”
His latest album, Charlie, which was released last October, is reflective of a continuously evolving pop music landscape. One of the standout tracks, “Left and Right,” features Jung Kook of K-Pop group BTS. Though Jung Kook sings in English throughout the song, Puth previously said that the Korean pop singer had immediately come to mind as he was writing it.
Puth notes that pop music has come a long way from the time he got started. He recalled a time when he was told that singing pop melodies over a Spanish guitar while making his song “We Don’t Talk Anymore” wouldn’t sound good. But now, he believes the realm has greatly diversified, as K-Pop, Latin and Afrofusion sounds continue to dominate the charts.
While Charlie has been out for less than a full year, Puth is already hard at work on his fourth studio album. He has teased his new era with two versions of a new song called “That’s Not How This Works,” one featuring Dan + Shay, and another with Sabrina Carpenter. The song is a pop record with R&B influences, which details an ex delivering mixed signals following a breakup. Puth plans to head more in the direction of R&B on this upcoming project, which he says is “about halfway done.”“Sometimes people do offer good critiques ... But I take everything with a grain of salt.” – Charlie Puth
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“I'm always very transparent as far as the process goes,” says Puth. “I feel like it's an album that I've always wanted to put out, focusing on a little bit more R&B-leaning music with the perfect mixture of pop. Because I'll always love Swedish melodies, but I got signed as a songwriter based on making music for R&B artists, and I've never put out an album like that for myself.”
Puth plans to put these R&B sounds on full display during the Dallas show. As fans know, he doesn’t like doing the same thing every night, and he tailors each of his shows to the city in which he is performing.
“Dallas loves mid-tempo hip-hop kind of feeding into pop music,” says Puth. “I mean, that's gonna be all throughout my show, but we're really going to take it to level 15 for the first night of the tour. There are versions of my songs with different drums, and this is all about better explaining my mind to the audience and my fans.”
