How TikTok Led to the Reinvention of Charlie Puth

Charlie Puth was looking for a sound.

Not just any sound, though. It needed to be random, a bit obscure. Maybe a hit against a table, a slap on the guitar? And then, as he documented to his dedicated TikTok following, a light bulb turned on. Or rather, a light switch.

And with that one flip of a switch, he created the foundation of his titular song, the first release from his upcoming album, Charlie. “I always knew I wanted to make a song with a sound effect in it,” he explained to E! News while promoting his Frito-Lay Super Bowl commercial. “You see my face mid-TikTok as I start to realize, Wait, this is actually kind of good.”

Unlike anything he’s done before—or, really, any musician, to be honest—he created the entire album in front of an audience of 15 million and counting. “The whole point in my downloading TikTok originally wasn’t to make a career advancement,” he admitted. “It was really just to educate people on how I make music.”