- Hey Vogue, I'm Charlie Puth
and we are in my home state of New Jersey
and today I'm gonna take you around some places
from my childhood that mean a whole lot to me, come!
[lively music]
Okay so this is completely different.
I remember my first jazz concert here, I was so nervous,
kinda like I am right now.
I really hope this looks the same.
Oh my God, it does.
Is the ceiling still falling down?
This is the Count Basie Theater,
I saw the Cranberries here,
I think I saw Tony Bennet here one time too.
I saw The Beach Boys here.
Wow, okay so they fixed the ceiling, same chairs though.
I remember coming to like jazz camp here
and I remember like the first two rows were sold out.
I was too afraid to sing in front of people
so I just played piano the entire time.
And then to maybe like 10 years later,
come back and see a sold out crowd for my first show,
that was a pretty good feeling.
I first started coming here when I was,
Dad, how old was I?
10, I remember my teacher said
you have abnormally large hands,
you're gonna be a fine piano player.
I've always been very self conscious of my hands
ever since then because it's a strange
thing to say to somebody, especially a 10 year old.
But I guess I can reach notes pretty well,
it was a good teacher, just a weird thing to say.
The stage is a lot smaller than I remember it being.
This is a wonderful venue, wonderful sound too.
[Charlie snapping]
Really nice reverberation.
My mom taught me piano first when I was four years old,
sorry I'm eating Tic-Tacs, mmm.
My mom taught me piano when I was four years old
and I always would hear her play
the same piece by Clemente.
Bum-ba-da-dun-dun,
dun-da-duh-dun-da!
That was my alarm clock, just her,
waking up and playing the piano.
So I had a natural inclination to just walk over
to the piano and try and play it all the time,
and I think that's how I developed
the whole perfect pitch thing that I have.
Follow me, is what I will say.
[light music]
Now we are leaving Red Bank, New Jersey.
We are leaving the Count Basie Theater,
and we are going uptown to Harlem, 121st and Claremont
in Manhattan School of Music
where I started when I was 14 years old.
I'll see ya there.
[light music]
[cars honking]
[light music]
Right now we're on the fifth floor
of Manhattan School of Music
where I spent 2004, '05', '06, '07, '08, '09, '10,
six years of my musical life.
My favorite thing was to walk down the hall
and hear the conglomerate of like
all the different types of music.
This was the classroom.
Jeremy Fletcher was my teacher and they were
[string music]
I hear, this is the exciting part,
you hear so many different sounds and noises.
This was my first class at 11 AM,
come here, and then I always was hopeful to graduate
to the intermediate jazz,
this was the beginner jazz.
I'm so scared to like open the door,
I like, I have war memories of like opening
the wrong door and disrupting music class
and the teacher yelling at me.
You guys can go in your class if you want.
- [Woman] [laughs] Okay, thank you.
Hello. - What is the class?
- It's our musical theater - It's history class.
- History, wanna join?
- Can I actually?
- Yeah! - Oh my God!
Do you wanna?
Hey guys, we have a surprise!
- Hello, hello.
[class cheering]
I'm sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt.
[class cheering]
What are you guys learning?
[class cheering]
- She was a beauty with outstanding dance technique,
natural acting ability and powerful charisma,
her career skyrocketed.
John McCracken was unable to sustain her success.
Within a short time, she dropped out of the public eye,
and descended into an untimely and tragically early death.
[piano music]
- We're in Hell's Kitchen,
we're at Berkley's newest studio.
This is the song that my mom would play every morning.
[piano music]
Classical piece of music
and every morning I would hear
[piano music]
and the same thing over and over again
and I think that's literally how the pitches
got stuck into my head.
The thing that I enjoy about TikTok the most
is seeing how people interpret things.
You give them something
and then they take it and remix it
and I love feeding my viewers on TikTok
a demo of a song, a song that I'm thinking about putting out
and them opening up, eyes that's open,
isolating the vocals and remixing it.
I'm making an entire album pretty much off TikTok right now
and I'm just giving little blurbs of each song
and I originally got the idea,
I remember when I made Stay for Kid Leroy,
Kid Leroy took out his cell phone
and just went on Instagram Live
and filmed himself like you know,
♪ I did the same thing I told ya ♪
and I was like dude, you're leaking the song,
the songs not even done!
And he was like trust me, people are gonna wanna hear this
early on so he's the first person I ever saw
like leak a song that had just been literally birthed.
What can I do with my brand to make my audience
feel involved and on the song writing level
which is my whole thing, if they feel like they're involved
in the song from the very beginning,
they're gonna number one know the lyrics,
number two feel like they wrote it with me in a way
so they feel connected to it.
[soft piano playing]
That's an ugly couple of notes if you put it together.
And then you can like put a little bass note in it
and it's like, that's actually the first chord
to Bad and Boujee by Migos.
[piano playing]
But when you add more, when you add more notes in between
you have the fifth, it's like okay that's still kinda creepy
but like when you would add the little colorful like C sharp
and the A flat like perfect form.
[piano playing]
My hope is when I perform these songs,
and I try to hide this as best I can when I'm on stage,
I'm so used to being in here, perfecting and tuning
every vocal and making sure that it sounds perfect
and I'm so worried that like my voice will fluctuate
in pitch live and I'm never happy with how I perform,
I hope that these songs are in a little bit of a lower key,
a bit easier to digest melodically,
it's not so Charlie, woo, all over the place.
I actually was here a couple weeks ago with my record label
playing my album for them which I was quite nervous about
because I've never played them a full body of work before,
I've always been expected to just deliver
like one off singles so I never thought they would want
to hear a complete body of work from me,
so that was very exciting.
They are seeing like the real side of me
which is a side they've never seen before.
They've seen a very surface level,
oh he's a producer who puts out catchy music kind of thing.
They never, but at the same time,
I never thought they cared about that,
I never thought anybody cared about what went on in my life
and I don't know, now for some reason people do
which makes me happy,
it makes explaining the music a little bit easier.
I'm gonna call it Charlie
'cause I've never had a chance,
it's like a self-titled album
but I never had a chance to put out music that is
you know in three, two, one, cliche sentence
but like is truly me and every song is like
just my personality with some melody attached to it.
[light music]