Fix See You Again to Inlcude Ft Charlie Puth
Charlie Puth Got Famous. Then He Got Good.
Fame well-nigh ate this 26-yr-old popular singer and songwriter alive. Now he'due south made one of the twelvemonth's best pop albums, "Voicenotes."
The 26-twelvemonth-one-time singer and songwriter Charlie Puth rocketed to fame with the 2015 Wiz Khalifa collaboration "See You Again." His new anthology, "Voicenotes," pushes him in different directions. Credit... Jake Michaels for The New York Times
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — In the modernist home hither where Charlie Puth has lived since December, an Aston Martin sits in the garage, the ceilings are tropical-forest alpine, the living room is sunken with leather couches, and the toilets raise their lids to greet y'all.
On a Sunday earlier this month, it was midafternoon and Mr. Puth hadn't eaten however, only he was in his pocket-sized home studio, with its racks of vintage synthesizers, working out some new ideas with the songwriter Johan Carlsson. He hopped on a keyboard with a distinct early-1990s vibe, gooey and a little cold, and began playing snippets of older songs: Toto's "Africa," Ol' Dirty Bastard's "Got Your Money," SWV's "Weak." He hitting upon a audio that made him happy — "similar mixing Jodeci with Tears for Fears," he said.
It was a few days before the release of "Voicenotes," his second album, and the first one non quickly microwaved to completion in the immediate aftermath of an out-of-nowhere megahit. In 2015, Mr. Puth was an up-and-coming songwriter when he rocketed into the pop troposphere with the Wiz Khalifa collaboration "See You Again," a moist lump of treacle from the "Furious seven" soundtrack. Other large hits followed, but none felt quite right to him.
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"I was trying to effigy out who I was musically in front of millions of people," he said, seated past the pool in the back of his house. He wore a Puff Daddy T-shirt tattered with attitude, yellow Adidas sweatpants and mesomorphic Alexander McQueen sneakers. His pilus was flamboyantly shaggy, as if a make clean dive had hit a wind tunnel.
"Voicenotes" is a confident, impressive pop album, with ironclad melodies and frisky takes on 1980s funk and 1990s soul. It turns out that Mr. Puth is non the maudlin crooner who entered the spotlight, but rather a sophisticated popular marksman with a souvenir for spare, pointed arrangements — he produced almost the whole anthology himself — and detailed, vulnerable lyrics. He gets wronged past an older woman on "Male child," and "LA Girls" is virtually how a whole city, and everyone in information technology, can interruption your heart. On "If You Exit Me Now," he duets with Boyz II Men, and on "Modify," with James Taylor. His falsetto, on "How Long," "Somebody Told Me" and more, is appealingly supple. All in all, it makes for ane of the boldest pop albums of the year.
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Getting here was not easy, though. For Mr. Puth, 26, the couple of years following "See You Again" were a juxtaposition of intense public success and equally intense private struggle. "A little bit of success, you think that I would be over the moon," he said, "merely quietly, it was really hard for me."
He had several smash singles, including the treacle two.0 of "One Telephone call Away" and the sensuous Selena Gomez duet "We Don't Talk Anymore," and his debut album, "Nine Track Mind," went platinum. Only it was rushed: "For the most part information technology was just filler," he said. Decisions were happening quickly. In a particularly fell example of tape label alchemy, a version of his vocal "One Phone call Away" was released featuring the Mexican starlet Sofia Reyes, the ur-country admirer Brett Eldredge and the salacious R&B crooner Ty Dolla Sign. (Yep, that is a real song.)
And for someone who grapples with anxiety issues, being suddenly thrust into the spotlight was disorienting. "I'chiliad already a very in-my-head anxious person," he said. "I don't really do well when I'm lone a lot because I'm lone with my thoughts which is not good. It gets very freaky. The big misconception is when you become more famous y'all take more friends. I notice that I'chiliad alone more than always at present."
He cried on Norwegian television. At a concert in Dallas, while singing "Nosotros Don't Talk Anymore," he cursed out Justin Bieber (Ms. Gomez'southward ex) in absentia, prompting love triangle speculation. He flirted with two married "Access Hollywood" hosts. ("The Puthinator came out to play," quipped the Australian gossip site Dolly). He was captured past paparazzi with the Hollywood wild-kid Bella Thorne on a Miami beach, then, after she posted a motion picture with her ex, melted down on Twitter just a few days later..
"He was put into a very difficult position 'cause the song ['Come across You Again'] was bigger than he was," said Kara DioGuardi, the striking songwriter and onetime "American Idol" approximate who taught Mr. Puth songwriting at Berklee College of Music. "I don't think he was prepared for that."
Ordinarily it takes pop stars decades to recant their ways and lament the falsity of fame; for Mr. Puth it took virtually eighteen months. "I can't pretend that I tin keep being that guy when I truly, truly wasn't," he said. "I'm the nerdy musician who likes to brand mixtapes for girls in 7th course. Now I'grand but older, and I'm nevertheless doing that."
By the time of the Jingle Brawl at Madison Square Garden at the terminate of 2016, he'd begun to unravel a fleck. At the bear witness, he was beating his pianoforte similar a drum kit and jerking his body theatrically like the Incredible Hulk breaking out of Bruce Banner's square slacks.
A few months later came "Attention," the slick, lithe, panting funk vamp that announced Mr. Puth'due south rebirth. It snarled, full of resentment about a woman attaching herself to Mr. Puth for the wrong reasons.
He now wonders if, during his brief amour with public life, his high-contour romances were more transactional than they felt in the moment. "I think I got — I'm trying to say this in the correct way and then I don't arrive trouble — it was more about the idea of me than actually wanting to exist with me," he said, "and I got that dislocated with actual honey and romanticism."
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For all his success, in that location is something all the same tender near Mr. Puth. He carries himself softly, behaves considerately. In schoolhouse, he was an eager student. "Driven, driven, driven," Ms. DioGuardi said. "Always ready to answer a question, expound on why he thought something was expert or bad. He stood out. He was quirky and funny." When he talks almost the work Babyface did on TLC's "CrazySexyCool," he notes how the intro is in B small and so the next vocal, "Creep," shifts to C small-scale. During the interview, when he heard a bird chirping in his backyard, he squawked dorsum, "B flat!"
He learned pianoforte from his mother, and commuted from New Jersey to the Manhattan School of Music before heading to higher at Berklee. During high school, he wrote jingles for YouTube stars, and later, in college, was briefly signed to Ellen DeGeneres's record label afterwards a YouTube embrace he did — a duet version of Adele'south "Someone Like You" — took off in 2011. When "See Y'all Again" became a smash, he was making his fashion as a behind-the-scenes force: Lil Wayne's "Zip But Trouble" began every bit Mr. Puth's song lamenting Instagram models; he wrote Trey Songz's "Slow Motion"; and he produced "Bankrupt," a madcap collaboration by Keith Urban, Jason Derulo and Stevie Wonder. (Again, yes, a existent song.)
But fifty-fifty though he's been working at becoming famous for so long, he'south even so growing into his pop star presence.
There was a brief flicker of the 2015-16 Puth around the release of "Attention." He went on "The Vocalisation" to perform the vocal, in a tight cerise shirt, surrounded past flexible female dancers. The "Phonation" gauge and new friend Adam Levine texted him later that he felt the performance wasn't a true reflection of his artistry.
Mr. Levine was right. "Information technology was fake," Mr. Puth said. "It was an invention in my listen, a hypothetical that would work." The side by side time he performed the song on telly, he stripped it downwardly with the Roots on "The Tonight Prove Starring Jimmy Fallon."
"Y'all tin can have a career like Bruno Mars and non be seen everywhere," Mr. Puth said. "I'one thousand getting dorsum my tortoise shell."
And doing so is maybe allowing him to put his heart on the line again. In the studio with Mr. Carlsson, instead of getting mired in the skepticism and frustration that define "Voicenotes," he was writing well-nigh how a new crush tingles:
I love the style
Those messages feel
When I write your name in my phone
Write your name in my phone, babe
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/16/arts/music/charlie-puth-voicenotes-interview.html
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