The Charlie Puth Interview

When Charlie Puth was just 12 years old, he thought that anyone could listen to a church service a couple of times and then play it from memory, note by note, without a score. He was convinced it was normal, like memorizing a paragraph from a book. Only later, thanks to a teacher at the Manhattan School of Music, did he discover that he had something very rare: perfect pitch. But the crazy part? It wasn't something he had sought. It just seemed natural to him. The point here is that much of the magic in pop music—those hooks that get stuck in your head, those emotions that seem almost universal—doesn't come from secret formulas or technical perfection. It comes from small imperfections, from gut instincts, and from the courage not to “fix everything.” We are used to thinking that success in pop is a matter of flawless production, perfect sounds, and voices polished to perfection by Auto-Tune. Instead, what Charlie is saying is that the true soul of a song emerges when you leave something imperfect: a chord that “clashes,” a recording that is deliberately not perfect, a verse that doesn't resolve as it should. The most powerful pop works because it makes you feel the tension, and then it resolves it—just like an engine that explodes and reassembles itself a thousand times a minute. And who are the main characters? Besides Charlie himself, who plays jazz and classical piano, there is Min Kim, his teacher, who tells him: “Even if you don’t practice, you won’t lose your perfect pitch; it stays with you for life.” Then there is Bloodpop, a producer and collaborator, who, while programming a video game, gives Charlie an “indescribable” sound that leads to a song; and finally, Manny Marroquin, the mixer who makes emotional choices, such as removing all the reverb from John Mayer’s voice in “Gravity” to make it raw, intimate, almost vulnerable. At the heart of this story are scenes that shift our perspective on what truly makes a hit. Charlie says he often memorizes a song better when he doesn't have the piano in front of him: he listens to it ten times, then sits down to play it all from memory. He says he prefers to listen to CDs and learn by ear rather than read sheet music. And when he hears a famous song played on the radio with the pitch raised to save time between commercials, he immediately notices that something is off—but instead of getting annoyed, he enjoys figuring out what has changed. He talks about a 1960s piano that was dropped during delivery: half the keys are out of tune, the other half are perfect. He only gets annoyed if an instrument is “overly” in tune—absolute perfection, for him, sounds flat, uninspiring. When he arranges songs, he explains that perfect autotune makes the sound smaller: “If everything is too precise, the voice loses emotion; it becomes small.” And he admits that he has often deleted and re-recorded entire vocal tracks because, after too much editing, the naturalness was gone. Surprisingly, he admits that sometimes the best decisions come when you don't overthink them: the most exciting chord progression often arises by chance, or after an impromptu jam. An example? His collaboration with Kenny G: “It's not a gimmick; that song just really needed him. And no one else could have done that solo.” Charlie says that the songs that really work are those where every detail—even the smallest—matters. But if you take away something essential, the song falls apart. Yet he is also willing to defend imperfection: “There’s no magic button for success. Today, there are no more gatekeepers; the audience decides. And I'd rather play in front of ten thousand people who have genuinely chosen to be there than have a hit and not know who's listening to me.” Then there’s the matter of groove: for Charlie, the sound of the kick drum, the snare, and the rest of the drum kit can change everything. He recounts working with Manny Marroquin, who made a kick drum sound “wider and more punchy” without ever revealing how. And he talks about listening on all kinds of speakers: from a super-sophisticated studio to broken speakers in the car, to a phone held to the ear—because that’s how ordinary people listen. But the less obvious insight concerns what the “secret” of pop music really is: the answer isn't perfection, but emotional recognition. Charlie insists that people feel the tension and release of a chord even if they don't know anything about music theory. As he puts it: “Even the least musical person can feel when something builds up and then releases.” And it's these little surprises, these dissonances, that make you want to listen to a song again. The paradox? The more you try to eliminate every flaw, the more the music loses its life. Perfection makes everything seem smaller, less human. The bottom line is this: Pop music doesn't win because it's perfect, but because it's imperfect in the right way. If you recognize yourself in this idea that true emotion comes from small imperfections, on Lara Notes you can press I'm In: it's not just a like; it's saying, “This perspective is now mine.” And if you happen to tell someone that Charlie Puth’s hit came from a strange sound, or that the secret was to leave a dissonance in the chord, on Lara Notes you can mark the conversation with Shared Offline—so the person you talked to will know about it. The song you just heard is by Rick Beato, and you've saved yourself almost two hours of interviewing.