In light of Charlie Puth’s namecheck in Taylor Swift’s latest album, we revisit our HERO 18 cover story with the musician. 

When a bog-standard sound check descends into a 20-minute jazz improv session, you know something a bit special is happening under the hood. “Did anybody record that?” Puth asks, squinting towards the sound desk in the empty arena at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre. About an hour later, 20,000 screaming fans listen to Puth stride through his chart-toppers, including summer banger Attention. 

With an encyclopaedic knowledge of music, a penchant for performance, and an ear for a body-popping beat, Puth is releasing his second album Voice Notes this fall – and this time he’s producing it all himself. 

Fabien Kruszelnicki: How’s everything going?
Charlie Puth: [putting phone away] It’s good, I was just looking at recording studios in Montréal.

James West: Can you go and just use any studio? If you get inspired and want to have a day in the studio, it doesn’t have to be yours, you can just rock up and plug in?
CP: I actually recorded all of the big singles from my first album in weird places. We Don’t Talk Anymore [with Selena Gomez] was made in my lawyer’s closest. 

JW: Was she there in the closest?
CP: She was in that closet.

FK: Why, for the sound?
CP: For the sound, we used it as a the vocal booth. And Attention was recorded on a tour bus and partially on a train while I was in Tokyo.

JW: Is that because of the kind of music that you make that you can do that?
CP: I can just make it on my laptop, like the guitar in We Don’t Talk Anymore, [sings] “Do do do do do do do do…” it was recorded on an iPhone and then side-chained. 

JW: What’s side-chaining?
CP: You know like in dance music, that pulsing kind of thing. It’s basically a compressor with a key kick, so you mute the kick and it makes room for the kick when you put it in, if that makes any sense?

JW: Like a gap.
CP: Yeah it’s a gap, and you put the gap on the iPhone recording and it sounds all fucked up and cool. It just kind of makes you go in and out with your body [rocks backwards and forwards]. So I’m obsessed with production and I’m always producing on the road, I’ll never go into a studio and make a beat. [elevator arrives in the background and goes bing] That elevator is a B. [sings] “Beeeeeeeeeeeee.” You want me to prove it? [pulls up a tuning app on his iPhone].

“Everything in my career has been opposite, I did everything in reverse…”

FK: How do you record the vocals, you do that part in a studio?
CP: Yeah you’ll do that in an actual studio. [holding up his phone] This will say B. [sings] “Beeeeeee.” Does it say B?

FK: Very close.
CP: [looks at the phone and sings higher until it reaches the B] There you go. B. That elevator is a B.

JW: You can use that in your next song.
CP: I can sample that and put it into a song and make it in B major or something like that.

JW: So I wanted to ask – people come to music in different ways, I know you studied production?
CP: Yeah.

JW: And I feel like technically you know what you’re talking about, you started learning piano at age four. Whereas on the other side of the spectrum some other dude might just strum a guitar and make it sound good but not really be super technical. Does that level of precision and musical knowledge affect you being spontaneous in writing?
CP: No, it always has to be spontaneous. Less is more. Honestly, you never want to do too much because then you don’t know what you’re doing. For example, this song that’s playing right now [song playing really quietly in the background in the hotel] – it’s Nothing Can Come Between Us by Sade, 1988 in F minor.

FK: Did you just Shazam that?
CP: No I just know this song. It’s slap bass, the kick, the side, the very popular late-80s side click with gated reverb on it, a pad, and some sort of electric piano and a rhythm guitar, and that’s it. That’s the entire song and her voice. So it’s sparse enough. I take that same mentality, and I’m a huge Sade fan too, the reason why her stuff is so approachable and grabbable is because there aren’t so many layers to it.

JW: It’s not like a Phil Spector, where everything’s in there.
CP: Right. That’s why rap records that are simple go viral because it’s just one big distorted 808 and a distorted vocal and they didn’t even bother to mix it, they just turned every level up and just… blwwerrr. It’s approachable, so that’s the same mindset I have when I go in with any artist, whether it’s myself or someone else, it has to have a simple amount of layers.

JW: So you’re producing stuff for other people and you write tracks for other people too. What do you get the most satisfaction from?
CP: For me there’s nothing like going in front of an audience and singing Attention or One Call Away and having them sing it back to you. You can rest your voice. [laughs]

JW: You can just go home!
CP: You can just go home, they’ll do the concert. No that will sometimes inspire another song on the spot, I’ll write another song on stage because of all that human energy in the room, so that’s great. But it’s exciting to me to be in the studio and you know, having the vocal, tuning and comping the vocal, it being so crystal clear that you know that people are going to sing along to it before it’s even out in the public. That was the same thing with Attention and everything that’s been successful on my end so far. I picture people singing it back to me so you always have to adjust the key of the record accordingly.

JW: So people can sing it easily?
CP: Yeah, so See You Again for example, [sings] “It’s been a lonnnng day.” Girls can sing that because it’s in B flat major, so when I’m writing I’m hearing voices, and a guy, you know, if he’s drunk – or not – can scream, “It’s been a looooooong day,” or drop the octive. The reason why some songs don’t do well is because it’s too operatic, too high, it’s like cool if you have an amazing voice and no one can sing like you but that might be the issue.

JW: So you get the initial idea for the song, or the hook, then do you change it much or is it pretty true to that first time you thought of it?
CP: The more true you keep it to the first time you thought of it the better it will be, for me at least. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t make changes, or lyric changes. But lyrics don’t come as quickly to me as melody, I’ll sometimes just be saying mumble jumble words, but the general phonetics are there.

JW: The shape of it.
CP: The shape of it is there, so you try and write lyrics around that, or as close as possible to how the mumbled lyrics are, that way it sounds like the demo and it sounds super comfortable.

“I think I’m going to write every song for the next ten years about the same girl.”

JW: And then for the new album that you’re working on now, have you shifted the sound somewhere that you felt it needed to go?
CP: Yes, so my first album… I’m not shitting on my first album… it’s a very bright album and I didn’t produce every single record because I had a lot on my plate, I had just been thrown into this artist thing. I had written See You Again, I was being flown around the world, and I didn’t really have time to do the album the way that I wanted to, but I did all the singles and I was super happy about that. This new album is musically showing what it was like when I had more time on my hands, sometimes too much time, to just sit down and make the record. My travels from the East Coast to the West Coast, how the two coasts are so different, how I almost got caught up in that Hollywood stuff.

JW: How do you escape that? A lot of actors and musicians go to LA and get sucked in…
CP: Yeah – you go back where you came from! And your family has to check on you, and luckily I’m not the most social person so I think that’s also what saved me. If I didn’t want to go to so-and-so’s house, or to Nightingale, I would go to my studio in my more humble house and make a record. And that’s basically how this whole album is made, from me being affected by the West Coast in a way.

FK: So you say you had more time to think on this second album?
CP: Definitely.

FK: Because most musicians seem to have had five years making that first album and then they break out and have to do the next one really quick…
CP: It’s been the opposite.

JW: How did you wangle that?
CP: I don’t know, everything in my career has been opposite. I did everything in reverse. [another elevator arrives] That elevator is a G which is interesting…

JW: You’re one elevator away from a full chord.
CP: Yes, well it’s a major third if you put them together. Anyway that’s music talk, what was I talking about again?

JW: How you managed to somehow have loads of time to do a second album.
FK: The wrong way round.
CP: I did it in reverse, everyone was worried, “Oh, the sophomore slump, he had three singles on his first album.” Now this single, Attention, is my biggest song so far and the album isn’t even out yet. It’s something I produced entirely by myself, I wrote it with Jacob Kasher, he’s one of my best friends, I feel very lucky.

JW: That breath [there’s a gap, and an exhale of breath on Attention] is that something that happened spontaneously or did you play it and you were like, “Ah, that would be really good there.”
CP: It was spontaneous. It wasn’t planned at all, and you know when you’re tracking vocals and you copy and paste the section over – it might not be completely done but you copy and paste the sections – I forgot to copy and paste the last chorus. I guess I was recording, it was 4am on a Sunday morning, whatever effect that has on you, and you start to think about who you actually wrote the song about. I think I was just overwhelmed at that point with all the intense emotions and I just let out a breath. I paused it, and I was still, and I was like [whispers] “That was pretty cool.” And that was how the idea came about to add one bar of silence. We have one bar of silence on the radio right now.

JW: But as a listener you feel it, it’s almost like you were saying about not making the track too complicated, you give the listener this space in the song and you almost relax into that silence and then BAM, it brings you back.
CP: Yeah. I think I’m going to write every song for the next ten years about the same girl.

JW: It will make life easier. So you’re finishing up this tour and then presumably this album comes out?
FK: And the next album has more of the vibe that Attention does?
CP: Yeah…

JW: How would you describe that sound, We’re all just sitting here bobbing up and down but it doesn’t translate into words so easily.
CP: Yeah, it’s gonna be boppy like that. How I describe Attention is that it’s like a late-’80s r’n’b emotional dance record. You have a very interesting time period on the musical scale for me from 1988 to 1990, which is why I bring up Sade, I’m obsessed with Sade, and those sonics. In 1985 everything was bright in music, they were still tracking everything with analogue tapes so you do get that warmth, but there were you know, Junos and Jupiters and all these sythesizers making things bright. And then Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who produced all New Edition stuff, and Bobby Brown, crafted this kind of warmer sound. That was 1988 to 1990, and that’s how we got into the classic 90s sound. We needed those two years of musical transition, and I always thought it was interesting. No musician that I know of dedicated their entire sophomore album to that, so that’s what I wanted to do.

JW: Were you born then?
CP: I’m 25 now I mean, I was born in 1991 so I wasn’t around for it.

JW: So do you think there’s a kind of nostalgic element as well because it’s inaccessible and it’s in the past? Or is it just an acoustic thing?
CP: It’s just out of listening to Luther Vandross and people like Cherrelle, who no one’s ever heard of, she does [sings] “Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturrrdayyyy”. I think it’s because I wasn’t around for it that it’s interesting to me. The drum machines, the LinnDrum machine, I have all the samples and they’re all included in this record. I don’t have the real drum machine, I just collected the samples and actually ran them through tape to mimic how they used to do it back in the day.

JW: I remember hearing that on a Simon and Garfunkel track they set up the drum kit next to an empty lift shaft. With the reverb and the atmosphere it sounds so rich. You must get so many producers sitting there at home using the same sample kits and making the same old shit.
CP: Yeah it’s so much more special, that’s why I bring up the guitar in We Don’t Talk Anymore, I could have easily gone into a professional recording studio instead. Or on Attention, I could have got a real bass player to play the part, but it sounded cooler with me individually playing the E flat. Record. D flat. Record.

JW: Then you have an emotional connection to the fact you actually played it and got that unique sound from the recording.
CP: Yes exactly. It just feels more me.

Feature originally published inside HERO 18.

grooming MICHELE BROWN;
special thanks to CLAIRE, ROBBIE, LIZ and DREW