100 newyork| december9–22, 2019
C harlie puth goes right for the pop-music rack at
Metropolis Vintage. The musician—known for one great album, one medi-
ocre one, and the Fast & Furious song “See You Again”—is looking for a
T-shirt from the ’90s or early aughts. He thumbs through about a hundred
of them, brow furrowed. “I’m surprised there’s not more New York hip-
hop,” he says. A shirt from ’N Sync’s first stadium tour almost makes him
jump up and down with glee. “Don’t get a picture of me with this one,” Puth
jokes to the photographer trailing us, pointing at a Bieber shirt.
Eventually, he settles on a $1,000 haul, including the ’N Sync shirt and
a Black Sabbath hoodie. “I was gonna get the Incubus shirt, but it was a
woman’s shirt; it wouldn’t fit right,” Puth says later. “But I love ‘Drive,’ by
Incubus. It reminds me of 2003 in the best way.”
For the record: Incubus released “Drive” in 1999, a correction Puth might
shudder to read. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of the recording indus-
try and could probably pinpoint exactly what 2003 sounded like and why
the pop gods decided it should sound that way. He has perfect pitch and is
prone to interrupting his own sentences to tell you things like, That bird
outside? It just squawked out a “B-flat.” The Beatles cover softly playing at
theRoseBar, where we’rehangingoutfortheday?That’sin“Gmajor.”Martin was making hits for Spears, he
wasn’t also a pop star himself. Puth grins.
“I don’t know if it’s been done super-well
before, but maybe I can do it.”
The pop-savant thing he can’t help. His
brain is full of half-songs, almost-beats,
and music trivia that it doesn’t really
make sense for him to know. (In his spare
time, he produced the Katy Perry song
“Small Talk” from a melody he’d just been
thinking about that day.) “I’m really sur-
prised that ‘Oops! ... I Did It Again’ wasn’t
a No. 1 song,” he says, about 15 years after
anyoneelsewonderedaboutthat. “Iwas
depressed after I heard ‘Can’t Feel My
Face,’ by the Weeknd, because I feel like
they cracked the code. They opened a new
door that hadn’t been openedyet,” he
says, when I ask him to give a State of the
Union on pop music today.
It’s funny and beguiling how he’s both
super-famous and as insecure as any other
20- something. “I’m just a big, confused
individual,” he says. “I’m finding more out
about myself every day. ThingsI never
knew about myself. It’s wild.” Hehad his
second therapy session the day before we
meet. “There was one thing I was going
through, and months went by and I’m not
fixing it like I usually can. I canusually
distract myself, my mind, with music. But
for the first time, I couldn’t.”
Puth reads his own press and has a
social-media instinct to overshare. Before
he answers my third question, he moves
my recorder closer to him. “I just wanna
make sure you don’t miss out,” he says. On
Twitter, Puth has rather crypticallyalluded
to one of his new singles, “Mother,” having
a secret meaning, or at least a read that’s
different from what it’s about on the sur-
face: a girl sneaking around with a boy
behind her mom’s back. He dangles this
fact, urging me to ask him aboutit. “Sev-
eral years ago, I was in a very emotionally
taxing relationship. It started tochange
my personality drastically. Without me
even knowing it, I started distancing
myself from my friends and people that
I grew up with. From the outside, the rela-
tionship was pristine,” he says. But it felt
toxic and twisted to him. “ ‘Mother’ just
sounds like a fun song about a time ten
years ago in my life, but it actuallyis quite
the opposite,” he continues. “It’s weird
hearing such a happy song on the radio
and knowing what it really is about.”
Last year, he said he wanted to be the
most approachable pop star there is.
That’s still true, but he’s just as interested
in playing with form and sound. He put a
cowbell ring in “Attention,” a choice his
co-producers thought was meant to be
ironic. Puth’s music, though, isnotablyThe CULTURE PAGES
Puth is a good singer, a good enough
performer, but a genius producer. His
rushed 2016 debut album, Nine Track
Mind, turned him into someone he
claims he didn’t want to be. “[It] felt like
a Twinkie factory,” he says. “Very manu-
factured, nothing had any personality
to it.” Afterward, he recalibrated, self-
producing all of 2018’s Voicenotes. There
are songs about kissing the wrong girls,
loving an older woman, a dress described
as “karma,” perfume regret. It drips with
an excited, lonely horniness in the way an
ideal pop record should. (An episode of
the New York Times’ Popcast declared
that every Charlie Puth song categori-
cally “fucks”—the erotic bassline on
“Attention” was enough to make the three
hosts blush.) In 2019, Puth reset again
with three radically different singles from
an album expected in 2020. “Everyone
thought that I was just gonnaput out
another version of ‘Attention’ or ‘How
Long,’ and I just wanted to put out the
complete opposite kind of thing,” he says.
Instead, “I Warned Myself ” is about
heartbreak—but sexy. It’s punctuated
with a choking sound.
Puth is from New Jersey and graduated
from Berklee College of Music in 2013.
He was briefly a YouTuber, posting his
music on the platform before he signed
with Atlantic Records in 2015 and moved
to Los Angeles. The 28-year-old is now on
track to be a super- producer on the level
of Ryan Tedder, the OneRepublic singer
who has made hits for Beyoncé, Taylor
Swift, and Adele. (“See You Again” was
the biggest rap record in a decade until
“Old Town Road.”) “I want to make hit
songs for other people, be responsible for
the beginning of their [careers], like how
Max Martin was to Britney Spears,” he
says. I gingerly remind him that when