Charlie Puth was recently back in a place he briefly called home last fall, the Blue Note Jazz Club Los Angeles, where he sat down with Billboard to talk about the residency run he did there in October — following a similar run at the New York Blue Note — as well as his upcoming fourth studio album, Whatever’s Clever (March 27).
And while the series typically involves a meal, given Puth’s legendary music nerd-dom, the singer instead took to the piano at the club and showed interviewer Tomás Mier how the songs came together and what his intentions were on the most personal collection he’s released to date.
Puth reminisced about jamming on a Boyz II Men classic with Babyface during the New York run, as well as with album guest vocalist Coco Jones (“Sideways”) in Los Angeles and special guest Jeff Goldblum, who pulled a fast one on the singer when he called an audible. “He gets on stage and he looks at the crowd and says, ‘Is anyone in here young enough to remember ‘All This Love’ by El DeBarge? And he was like, ‘You know how to play it, right Charlie?’”
The show ended up being two hours long because Puth and Goldblum ended up doing 30 minutes of covers based on the actor’s suggestions, which included a crowd sing-along to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” Goldblum, as it turns out, is on track 11 of the album, “Until It Happens To You,” which includes the Wicked star sharing some sage advice.
Puth said the BloodPop-produced LP is “inherently jazzy” and breaks with what he said is a typical criticism of his music, that people know his music before they know him. BloodPop felt that way as well, and he said he wanted to be part of helping Puth fix that perception. “Slightly rearranging the perspective, put life first and let the music follow,” Puth said. (Watch the full interview above.)
So that’s what Puth did, starting with the prompt to write a song about his dad, a personal place he’d never gone before that BloodPop said the singer’s dad might need some day. The song is called “Cry” and, naturally, it made Puth’s dad cry, so challenge accepted and completed. That went well enough that Puth also wrote a song for his brother, called, you guessed it, “Hey Brother.”
“What’s funny is I don’t consider any of these 12 songs to be clever, I consider them to be real,” said Puth about the “incredibly honest” tracks he thinks will give his fans more insight into who he is as a person than anything he’s released to date as he played his way through the tracks and gave rundowns of what inspired them on the Blue Note’s grand piano.
And, because the album ends with the mea culpa “I Used to Be Cringe,” Puth happily went through his various cringe eras, from his fake lip ring to writing a funny song called “Marvin Gaye” and his, in retrospect, mega-cringe high school-era CharliesVlogs days, where he posted his earliest original tunes (check out “I Don’t Wanna Hurt You Baby”) and did prank calls using Auto-Tune.
Though the album is full of intimate, jazzy tunes that are perfect for a club like the Blue Note, Puth promised that his team is putting together a killer stage set-up that will make the songs come to life on his Whatever’s Clever arena tour, which kicks off on April 22 at Viejas Arena in San Diego.
