Nothing To Hide
Two days ago, Charlie Puth performed on the World Stage at Rock In Rio 2024 — and the metaphorical world stage has been his second home for the past decade — but he has never been happier to rush home. Puth married Brooke Sansone on September 7 and perks up at the mention of building their life together even more than his reflexive enthusiasm when describing the intricacies of producing a multi-layered song. He moved to Santa Barbara, California and gushes about mundane suburbia with childlike wonder. “I care about music so much, but I also care about my family and my wife and my house — and my grass!” he says over Zoom in late September. He walks outside without feeling like “a defensive driver” and leaves the studio at 7 p.m. without feeling drenched in perfectionist guilt.
In short, Charlie Puth has a life now. “I can only go off the reactions of people closest to me, and everybody says that I seem relaxed and very confident, not as agitated,” Puth, 32, says. “I used to kind of bask in the chaos and think that I could only make good art if my life was in slight turmoil with some drama associated. I was putting on a show, and now, I don't need to put on a show.” Puth pauses, then quips: “But I can certainly make a show. And I did make a show.” Puth is at peace in Santa Barbara, but he finally feels most at home within himself — and the front door is wide open. The welcome mat reads, The Charlie Puth Show.The Charlie Puth Show premiered exclusively on The Roku Channel on October 4 and became the No. 1 on-demand title by reach on The Roku Channel that weekend. Puth first thought he might like to have his own TV show while living at his parents’ house and facing the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic might kill live music beyond repair. He needed a Plan B. In the spring of 2020, he connected with Rob Eric, the Chief Creative Officer at Scout Productions, who served as executive producer on The Charlie Puth Show.
“What's in Charlie’s head comes out,” says Eric (Queer Eye, Legendary, The Hype). “I just was fascinated because I work the same way. I'm crazy inside my head. I have to put it outside somehow. We started talking, and I thought, What if we tried to do a reality show, but we did the reality inside your head?”
Eric’s framing clicked in Puth’s head, resulting in six episodes of poignant sincerity coated in exaggerated hilarity.
“The theme is every episode is someone or something — or something inside of me — telling me to be different,” Puth says. The Charlie Puth Show incorporates Puth’s real-life experiences, like clicking his teeth to make a beat to the tune of four root canals, as seeds for cartoonish plots, like Puth needing to go country to protect his teeth because country music is “less rhythmic” and calling Chris Lane for advice. The version of Puth in the series desperately chases multi-hyphenate influencer status after waving the white flag. Just being a musician — a chart-topper and multi-platinum-certified singer/songwriter and producer, in Puth’s case — won’t cut it.
As Carrie Franklin, executive producer and showrunner, says, “When people asked what the show was, I would say it’s a love letter to music and a ransom note to the industry.”
The unscripted comedy’s sizzle reel earned an immediate straight-to-series order from Brian Tannenbaum, Head Of Originals, Roku. He met Puth in May 2023 at Roku’s NewFronts in New York City to announce The Charlie Puth Show. It struck Tannenbaum that Puth, a “once-in-a-generation talent,” cared enough to show up.
“He did not need to do this show; he wanted to do it,” Tannenbaum says. “If I don’t have that passion, we can’t deliver. Roku can match care.”
Franklin, who previously produced Nicole Richie’s Candidly Nicole and Nikki Fre$h, adds, “Charlie is absolutely down to play a heightened version of himself. It’s all about the talent’s willingness to be the butt of the joke and have a significant understanding of the world in which they’re navigating. Charlie could just be locked in his studio all day making music. That’s truly who he is. For him to learn that’s not enough anymore? It’s ridiculous. And he embraced all of that. He’s got that Larry David quality about him where he can’t just sit still in a situation; he has to comment on it.”
The first scene finds Puth and Will Ferrell exercising in an expansive backyard — an entirely believable scenario within Puth’s new day-to-day. As the series unfolds, Puth promises Roku that he will reunite One Direction to help them promote his reality series. He and John Legend team to make a jingle for a Roku 65” Pro Series TV. He consults with Courteney Cox about navigating brand deals. He enlists celebrity stylist Law Roach and Queer Eye fashion expert Tan France to zhuzh his appeal. John Mayer, Wiz Khalifa, Sarah Silverman, Weird Al Yankovic, and Dorinda Medley are among the other stars who appear throughout the series.
“I was so nervous to ask all of them,” Puth says. “I just texted Will, and he was one of the first people to write back. There was a very obvious validation in [people] I've looked up to for a very long time — and, here they are, just taking a bet on me.”
The third episode opens with Puth lying in bed during a virtual session with Rosie O’Donnell, who acts as his therapist. She calls him out for toying with instruments to deflect her questions about his feelings. On the surface, this is a jab at his reputation for perfect pitch and using household objects to create entire songs on TikTok. In truth, however, the scene speaks to Puth’s efforts to stop hiding behind instrumentation and mounds of layered production.
“His soul is out there for you to see — there's nothing hidden,” Eric says. “I'll tell you this much about his humble nature: Somebody as big as Charlie, a superstar, would text me like, ‘Was that okay today?’ He was so worried about coming across as cringe. I’m like, ‘It is okay for you to come across as cringe because it's not about perfection; it's about who you are as a human.’”
Behind the shield of The Charlie Puth Show, Puth experimented with replacing self-defense with self-deprecation. His lighthearted humor carried a vulnerable subtext. In the process, he realized he didn’t want to hide at all.
“I do feel like a lot of people still don't know me,” Puth says. “My goal is, after this year, to have people know me. I feel like a lot of people don't like me, and they hold a little bit of disdain for me because I'm in your face a lot. I don't rub the ‘perfect pitch’ thing in, but it can come off as a little braggadocious. My personality can be loud at times, but I just wish people knew that [it’s because] I care so much.”
He continues, “I can understand why people get annoyed with me sometimes — thinking that I feel like I do know everything. But I really don't. I know we're in an era of people not really loving celebrities anymore, but I don't consider myself one. I consider myself a creator who is constantly trying to learn.”
Puth used to be a self-diagnosed late bloomer, but he’s learning that everything happened as it was meant — that he was slowly creating his dream reality all along.
Puth is still surprised by the public’s interest in his personal life. Specifically, his marriage to Sansone. “I'd say for six years people knew my songs better than me, and now, they're interested in things like me just getting married — apparently, that’s news,” Puth says. “I never thought people would care about that, but I’m happy they care.” Puth still prefers to keep his private life as private as possible, but his and Sansone’s relationship embodies his newfound trust in fate. It’s also romantic as hell.
Puth grew up in Rumson, New Jersey, and Sansone is also from New Jersey, so Puth and Sansone orbited each other, but the timing was always off — until it wasn’t.
“If I was dating someone and Brooke was dating someone, we'd eventually part ways with those people and find our way back to each other again,” Puth says. “We kept falling back to each other. It just happened so many times. My parents and her parents have known each other since they were teenagers, so they wanted it to happen. It is very full circle.”
Puth enjoyed an idyllic adolescence in Rumson, outside of his well-worn story about a black Labrador retriever mauling him at two years old and causing his famed eyebrow scar. Most mornings, his mother’s piano playing served as his alarm clock. From a young age, music appealed to Puth because he identified he “was able to move people,” even if just by “writing a chord progression that felt like a hug.” He fondly recalls listening to James Taylor playing when riding in the backseat of his parents’ Suburban as a formative experience.
I consider myself a creator who is constantly trying to learn
we were driving through the city and people were beeping at us because we're not used to driving in the city, James Taylor would come on, and there would be a sense of calm,” Puth says. “I would listen to these artists and think to myself, Well, if they can do it, I can possibly do it, too.”
The Puths called Jon Bon Jovi and Bruce Springsteen neighbors, so Puth had a front-row seat to music’s unique potential for seismic resonance. Puth would eventually impact large swaths of people in unimaginable ways, but it took trial and error — beginning with playing piano in the Roman Catholic church. He estimates he was probably 12 when he couldn’t comprehend why the music had to be so “13th-century” and how nobody had bothered with “any musical updates.” So, he took it upon himself.
“I put a little beat on an MPC, and when I went to mass the next day, I remember getting a visceral reaction from all the churchgoers,” Puth says. “They were like, ‘Heavens, why would you ever put a beat machine against the organ?!’ I think I got scolded by a priest. That was the first time that, musically, I got a reaction from people. I just want a reaction out of anything that I make.”
The 7,000 people of Rumson knew Puth as “the weird child selling CDs,” according to Puth, “but everyone in town was very supportive.” He didn’t start singing until he was around 18 and was “terrified to sing in front of people” when he arrived at Berklee College Of Music, from which he graduated in 2013. He turned toward YouTube to build a broader community before signing with Atlantic Records in 2015 — the same year he shot to global ubiquity as the featured artist on Wiz Khalifa’s “See You Again.”
The rap ballad from the Furious 7 soundtrack earned three Grammy nominations, spent 12 weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, and topped several other Billboard charts. Puth followed that by releasing Nine Track Mind, his debut LP, in January 2016. His omnipresence in the zeitgeist was bolstered by pop earworms like “One Call Away,” “Marvin Gaye” featuring Meghan Trainor, and “We Don’t Talk Anymore” featuring Selena Gomez.
While churning out radio-ready hit after radio-ready hit minted Puth as a genius producer, Puth struggled with feeling like a product. He felt pressured to capitalize on the “See You Again” momentum and didn’t yet know that he deserved to give himself time to discover organically what he really had to say.
Puth waited until 2018 to release Voicenotes, his sophomore LP. The album earned a Grammy nomination for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. “Attention” and “How Long” blew up — rinse, repeat — but Puth couldn’t quite find himself in the music.
“I don't know if my 2018 self understood half of what I was saying, but there was a little part of me that was trying to peek out, like, ‘Hey, this is the direction you should be going in. It's not going to happen right away, and you're going to make a lot of mistakes in the next couple of years, but it's all going to happen eventually,’” Puth says. “When does the frontal lobe start to develop in guys?”
“Late,” I confirm.
“Yeah, I'm a prime example of that,” Puth says.
Sir Elton John nudged Puth during a serendipitous run-in at Craig’s in West Hollywood in 2019. Elton bluntly told Puth that his recent music “sucked,” confirming what Puth had already suspected.
“When your idol is telling you that you can't have 15 people write songs for you just because the record label“When your idol is telling you that you can't have 15 people write songs for you just because the record label told you that's the way to go, you listen to that person,” Puth says. Puth channeled John’s tough love into Charlie, his third LP released in October 2022.
The isolating nature of the COVID-19 pandemic forced Puth to reconnect with his YouTube roots. This time, he crafted Charlie on TikTok in real-time. (In hindsight, the Charlie Chronicles was an incidental prequel to The Charlie Puth Show.) His fans saw his mythical “perfect pitch” in action — flipping a light switch and incorporating that into the soundscape of “Light Switch,” the platinum-certified lead single, or extracting notes from a creaking door for “No More Drama.” Puth’s TikTok showing the implementation of his voice literally bouncing from left to right in “Left And Right” featuring Jung Kook (yet another Billboard Hot 100 charter) has been viewed 38.6 million times.
“I really believe it wouldn't have been as successful as it was without the love of the internet backing it up and [fans] telling me to keep going,” Puth says.
Puth listened to his fans’ encouragement to trust his instincts. Now, he feels comfortable relying on his intuition while working on his fourth album, which he’s “making entirely by myself.” Taylor Swift made it impossible to block out all the noise, however. In April, Swift name-checked him in the title track of The Tortured Poets Department, singing, “You smoked, then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.” Puth first heard the song while brushing his teeth before bed. After verifying it wasn’t some cruel joke, he cried.
Just like with his wedding, Puth was surprised to see his name dominate positive headlines. Ultimately, Swift’s unsolicited shout-out pushed him to drop “Hero,” his standalone, stripped-back May single.
“She’s such a talent and, obviously, can one hundred percent write a song for herself, and I can, too,” Puth says. “This is just how I interpreted it, but maybe she was thinking to herself, Why don’t more people know that he’s like this? I'm glad the biggest artist in the world is saying that I should be a bigger artist, but I don't know if I want to be the No. 1 artist in the world. I don't know if I ever want to be the blue flame.”
For now, Puth is fueled by being a freer artist.
I don't know if I ever want to be the blue flame.
Spoiler alert: The sixth episode of The Charlie Puth Show reveals Puth’s failure to reunite One Direction. He begrudgingly pivots and, nodding to School Of Rock, gathers schoolchildren to form a band and perform a song called “Some Direction” at a bar.
“That episode represented that, sometimes, you go with what sounds better and what feels better,” Puth says. “It doesn't have to be the biggest thing in the world, and you don't have to have a good-sounding song. Not to get too hoity-toity — it's a comedy show; it’s supposed to just make you laugh — but there is a meaning behind the meaning. People want authenticity.”
Puth’s authenticity was infectious on The Charlie Puth Show set. Tannenbaum credits Puth with “challenging us all to be our best selves” because he was so uninhibited. Sound engineers regularly broke into laughter during Puth’s improvised riffs, such as brainstorming names for products like “Puth-pourri.”
Eric and Franklin had run numerous highly successful sets in the past, but Puth’s earnest demeanor created a uniquely inviting and fun environment. Franklin admits that, while she’d heard of Puth, she was unfamiliar with his music before they met in early 2023. But she was sold five minutes into talking with him.
“I wish people understood he’s not just the guy on the street who can name the note when you clank your wine glass,” Franklin says. “In the words of poet laureate Miss Taylor Alison Swift, Charlie Puth deserves to be a bigger artist. Not one celebrity whom we reached out to said no. John Mayer was like, ‘I’d do anything for Charlie.’ These huge musicians respect him. They know what I think the rest of the world is going to catch up to. They made me go, Oh, I need to take more notice of this guy. I became a fan of his music, but really, I became a fan of him.”
Puth takes pleasure in the dichotomy of his reputation for polished musicianship and the purposefully unpolished The Charlie Puth Show existing simultaneously. It wouldn’t be the worst thing if this moment in his career sent people into a tailspin of cognitive dissonance, challenging them to reassess long-held judgments. He hopes everyone is as willing as Franklin to form a holistic opinion of him.
Still, Charlie Puth wouldn’t be Charlie Puth if he didn’t take the succinct yet effective The Charlie Puth Show theme song seriously.
“Whenever I can't think of lyrics, I just say to myself, ‘Well, what is it?’” Puth says. “I was like, ‘It's The Charlie Puth Show.’ I just started singing, ‘It's The Charlie Puth Show,’ but it sounded so lame in my voice, so I pitched it up like five Semitones. and it sounded like Alvin and the Chipmunks. I thought, This is stupid. They're going to hate this. But they wrote back, 'We love it.'"
Puth’s tendency to press for musical perfection will never totally dissipate, but he’s learned to reframe and open himself up to people favoring his imperfect self-expression. “I care about perfection, but I also know the fine line between perfection and unapproachable,” he says. Puth illustrates that point by opening a Pro Tools session he’s working on.
“This song I’m looking at now — no real title for it yet —has about eight tracks, and it’s really about my vocal,” Puth says. “It's just as real and raw as I can be. It's less about sneaking in the secret synth that no one cares about. They care about what I'm singing, and I should care about what I'm singing. I'm writing all the words, and I'm not really processing my vocals because my production idol, Max Martin, told me that what he misses from me is emotion in some areas musically. That comes from not tuning the vocals to high heavens and just letting it breathe.”
The music can breathe because Puth let himself breathe. When he began filming The Charlie Puth Show, he had also just begun dating Sansone. He still thought “the world is all about me,” he says, but soon found that his “life got better when I truly shared my life with someone else.” Puth let himself fill out his life away from music so that he could naturally pour back into it.
“I do feel more at home in my music,” Puth says. “I don't feel insecure about being the 32-year-old band geek anymore, or the guy on the internet making fun of himself and now making fun of himself on a Roku TV show. Hopefully, this album is my best performing one. I'd love 10 etched-in-stone songs that say as much about me as an hour-long interview. I feel like there's only one of me. I just feel like that's when an artist is in their prime — when they realize that there's only one of them.”
I feel like there's only one of me. I just feel like that's when an artist is in their prime — when they realize that there's only one of them.
