Charlie Puth
first fell in love with music growing up by the shore in Rumson, New Jersey. “I didn’t grow up wealthy,” he says. “But my mom and dad worked really hard and came from the bottom up.” He credits his supportive parents for his early music education, citing his idol James Taylor as his primary influence. “My mom would put headphones on her belly and play his records to me while she was pregnant,” he says. Later on, Puth’s father exposed him to R&B artists like Barry White, The Isley Brothers, and Marvin Gaye, while his mother, a piano teacher, played him classical music and began teaching him piano when he was four years old.

Puth played piano throughout his childhood and began studying jazz at the age of 10. As a high-school student, he spent his Saturdays commuting into the city to study classical and jazz at Manhattan School of Music in Harlem. “I thought I was going to be a jazz piano player, but I always had an interest in pop because my parents would listen to all this pop music,” he recalls. “I always tried to incorporate pop elements into the jazz I was playing.” Puth began listening to more and more pop, fascinated by the way it was produced, especially Max Martin’s late ’90s work, which led him to buy his first music production keyboard at age 11 and start making his own CDs. Shortly after, Puth began writing his own songs and eventually posting them on YouTube, along with covers. In 2011, Ellen DeGeneres tapped Puth and a friend to appear on her show after their cover of Adele’s “Someone Like You” went viral. Puth appeared on the show twice and watched his international fan base grow both on and offline. “It got me in front of 30 million people,” he says of the experience. “It pushed me into a different area I never thought I would reach.”

Puth has since worked with Max Martin (on Nine Track Mind’s “Then There’s You”) and returned to DeGeneres’ show to perform “See You Again” with Wiz Khalifa, so in a sense, he’s come full circle. And his most fervent wish is that his fans will be as inspired by his story as he is by theirs. “I’ve gotten some pretty powerful messages from fans,” Puth says. “There was one girl who was being physically abused by her parents and she made the decision to run out of her home. She had my music on her iPod when she was running away. I check in on her and make sure she’s okay. People go through some crazy shit in this world, and they need some sort of soundtrack to go along with their lives because sometimes it's really hard. It's kind of nice to have a comforting voice or an uplifting melody to help you get to wherever you’re going.”