Transcript of Charlie Puth

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert. I'm Dax Sheppard, and I'm joined by Monica Padman. Hi. You may have seen our guest, but a mere two Sundays ago.

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Puth. Charlie Puth is a Grammy-nominated singer, songwriter, musician, and record producer. His albums are 9 Track Mind, Voice Notes, Charlie, and he has a new album out March 27th, very special birthday, called Whatever's Clever.

This was so funny. You get to hear the way his brain works musically, and it is shocking. It's so fascinating. Beautiful mind-esque. Yes.

Yeah. Please enjoy Charlie Pooth.

He's an object, Hi there. Nice to meet you, Charlie.

Nice to meet you. How are you doing?

Hey, this is the greatest fucking setup I've ever seen.

Oh, that is kind.

What part of town do you live in?

I live in Santa Barbara.

Oh, my goodness. I lived there for one year as a college student. Are you a Montecito?

I say Santa Barbara because it sounds a little cooler. No.

You're afraid it sounds bougey to live in? It is boujee. Although yesterday was a very un-Montecido day for me.

What happened? Tell me. I saw this dog running down San Yucidro It's a little fluffy, hyperalogenic little pup.

Maybe like a doodle mix.

Like a little doodle mix running cars. There's no police in the fucking town. Sure. The dog's running. He's going to get hit by a car. I throw the hazards on. My pregnant wife, we were going to pick up her car and we're like, We're not doing it right now. I run out in the street and pick this dog up, put him in the back seat, and then 2 hours of really intense looking for the owner.

Did it have a little tag on him?

It did, but this is the most California shit ever. It led to...

A business manager? Basically.

I swear to the dog's business manager. The dog's business manager. A humane society. The guy picked up yauning. Hello? I'm like, I found this dog, but there's no owner attached to the tag. Do you know who's the dog? He says, May I ask who's calling? I'm like, Okay, some...

Yeah, some urgency would be nice.

Some urgency here.

My wife's car is ready for pickup.

Yeah. Don't you have any idea how important this is?

But anyway. You just answered one of my questions, which is you were brutally attacked by a dog as a child, and I did wonder if it led to a permanent fear of dogs because I have one. I have one.

Did you get bit by a dog?

Yeah. These two Dobermans ran off a porch when I was a kid and I was across the street and they jumped on top of me and the owner came. I didn't suffer any permanent, but fuck did it. It scared the shit out of me. Yeah. Who was your attacker?

It was a black lab, and it was when I was two years old, so I don't really remember a whole lot of it.

Okay, but your parents must have shit bricks.

I almost died. Really? If you look really closely, why would you look super close up to my face we just met? Can. Can.

You invite me.

Feel free to exit your chair and really get in there.

In 1992, 400 stitches at this area was really tough at the time.

Four hundred? You got your eye.

Did take your whole... No, it didn't. It got one centimeter away. So I got really lucky. But what's really funny is I love dogs. In 2019, I adopted a black lab.

You have Stockholm syndrome where you fall in love with your oppressor.

Wolf presser.

I am imagining your face, probably for a minute, your parents must have thought, Oh, my God, he's never going to look the same. Were you pretty deformed up top for a minute?

For a while, I was. I was pretty bandaged up for a while up until a couple of weeks ago?

Just in time for the pod.

Just in time for the pod. We needed a story. I went to four years old.

Did you have more than one surgery?

I think multiple surgeries. I very vaguely remember going to the hospital.

She has a huge dog phobia.

Yeah, I don't like dogs at all, and I'm fine saying it.

That's fine. My My wife does not like dogs either. That dog I mentioned lives with my parents now.

Okay. Are you self-conscious about your eyes still? Do you still sometimes feel?

I like it. If I didn't have it, I'm just a white guy with brown hair. But I'm more self-conscious about, and I was just talking to somebody about this, my voice. I'm really self-conscious about singing.

Oh, you're singing for it?

It's my job.

What version of self-conscious? You personally don't like the sound of it or you think other people don't?

You ever hear people say, I don't like the way that my voice sounds? Well, your voice sounds different. Recording than it does to you because 70% of your voice is actually the vibration that's happening all around your head. When I listen back to this, I'm always going to sound… I'm now used to it, but people who aren't used to it are just hearing the remaining 30% of just Audible.

Yeah, so I've always heard this, and I guess I don't have a memory of hearing my voice and going like, What? But my voice to me in my head sounds exactly as it does if I listen to this show.

You probably hear your speaking voice recorded. A lot. A lot. That's true. In many forms of media.

More than most.

More than most. You're probably used to it in a way, but you think I would be. Jeff Goldblum asked me to come sing at his show at the Troubadour the other night because I just happened to be in town.

He plays clarinet. What's he playing?

He plays piano. He's okay.

I'm sorry. That's Woody Allen who plays the clarinet, lest us not confuse them.

I went up there and I sing pop music for a living. I'm not used to singing jazz standards, and I felt very naked up there, and I didn't have my piano behind me. For the first 30 seconds, and I've been doing this for not a whole long time, but 10 years. My voice is shaking a little bit because I'm nervous, but I guess it's good that I still care.

How long does it take to settle in?

It took up until the first chorus because the audience was really great, too. They were very excited.

Yeah, they're not haters at a Jeff Goldbloom jazz concert.

I've experienced a couple of haters, but when I first started touring, too.

Sure. But I'm saying if you're the type of person that loves Jeff Goldbloom's jazz band, I think you've already weeded out the haters. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that does make sense, actually. You're reaching a very niche audience. They care about him a lot, though.

Yeah. But I don't think the fear goes away, even if the circumstance is perfect.

That is true. I just know from doing standup, It is impossible the difference between different rooms. People who go to Largo, they love comedy. They're going to love whatever they see. They're into it, like being in a punk rock. So they love it. They're junkies. Whereas you perform in Vegas and it's like, I'm not even sure why they went to this show. They have lost money. They're from different parts of the country. It's a disaster. Same material.

Standup, I think, is the hardest job.

It's the most scary, I would say, for sure.

Because you have, other than maybe some intro music walking on stage. I have music behind me the entire time.

Exactly. If you're doing just okay, presumably the music will be so enjoyable. It can get you through it. But if you're sitting in the bed in comedy, there's nothing else going on.

Especially, remember Brian Yeah, I remember. He doesn't curse in his act at all, and he still makes me belly laugh. I remember seeing videos of Sam Kinison and just the dice and the almost borderline awkward silence that would happen, but it was all part of the art of it all. It's like the silence was just as important as the words that were being said.

Yes, it's breaking that tension.

To do that without music. If I had a keyboard here, I have a bed of white noise I can play over, and then the words come out easier. You have nothing. You have the sound of laughter. A lot of respect.

Have you ever done an acapella thing live?

I made acapella music with Boys 2 Men.

Okay, great. They're good at it.

They're pretty good at it. They're a little better than me. We did that on my second album. That was 144 vocal tracks.

You're having to fine tune levels on 140 tracks?

Every detail matters. They know how to sing, but in order to it like a full sound, we'll record one vocal and then put the microphone back a little bit. Say it again. Same piece of music, say it again. Put the microphone back because the most important thing while recording is capturing the air of the room, even if that air conditioner was on. You know how when you're like, Oh, 10 seconds for room? Tone. The tone is just important as whoever's singing whoever is playing an instrument because the tone sets the stage for the record. You know a record called What's Going On by Marvin Gay? Marvin Gay always had a lot of question marks in his music. Sure. Marvin Gay, What's Going On? In the very beginning of that record, it sounds like a party. If you can play it in your head, people are talking, Hey, what's happening? Blah, blah, blah, blah.

It's the one that's famously was ripped off, right? That's the track?

Not that song. I'm talking about the original. Okay. Mother, mother, there's too many times-Oh, yeah.

You can just hear.

In the very beginning, hear a bed of noise. It's just a bunch of people having a party, and plays throughout the song when the music comes in, that's the bed of noise. I don't want to lose anybody here. No, this is fascinating.

We like expertise here, so that was perfect.

Do you know the famous story about Led Zeppelin? I want to say Led Zeppelin 2, that album. They rented this crazy English estate, and Bonham set up his kit in this huge vacuous stairwell. And all the drum tracks on that album are so wild sounding because Because they're in this weird echoey chamber, and he played so hard.

Well, that's what reverb. I didn't know that, by the way, but that makes sense.

It's nature's reverb.

Nature's reverb is reverb. You go to Blackbird Studio in Nashville, they have a room. It's the size of this, but the ceiling is 40 feet, and they record guitars in there. You can, of course, capture that synthetically with computer plugins.

Well, even pedals, right? I mean, there's so many guitar pedals that do reverb.

But those are all replicated from the real thing, which is reverb. I mean, this is a pretty tight sounding room because we're recording it.

That's the goal. I don't know if this show would sound better with a ton of reverb.

I got scared. I was like, You put it to the test. What if we heard all this echo?

Can you imagine if your show did have a ton of reverb?

Yeah, it'd be cool, I guess. I could see Jack White doing a podcast where it had a ton of reverb.

Yeah. Radio shows in New Jersey, where I'm from, always had. There was this morning show that had a ton of reverb on it. New Jersey 101. 1 WCBS FM. They had a radio show in the '90s I can't remember the name of the host, but they always sounded like they were in one of those tunnels.

Okay, yes, you're from New Jersey. I'm imagining you're semi-close to Manhattan as you commuted at one point in high school. Like an hour away. What town is it?

Rumson. It's like a business town. It would remind somebody of Connecticut, something like 7,000 people. You can take a boat into South Street, Wall Street. Not a very musical town, but a very nice town.

Fancy?

Fancy. Little Connecticut fancy. Yeah, but interesting because it's on a peninsula, so I grew up on the beach. Oh, yeah. Another headline. But I like it there. I haven't been back in a long time, but close to Asbury Park, which is where Bruce, I believe Bruce is from there.

Okay. Do people commute by boat into the city?

They do.

Oh, my gosh. That would be so fun.

It's not a nice boat. It's like a ferry. It's like a big catamaran ferry where they serve vodka at five o'clock in the morning.

That's good for those Wall Street guests.

That's when you know the market is down. It's a real bear market.

Everyone's hounding vodka. A very unmusical town, but everyone in New Jersey is their own local celebrity. I had the guy who played the Beach Clubs with his acoustic guitar would teach me music. I had a guitar teacher that was the best guitar teacher in town. He was known as being the best guitar teacher in town.

You know the thing in Detroit was, is everyone you met had an uncle who had played in Bob Seeger's band, in the Silver Bowl band. Everyone When you met's uncle was in the Silver Bowl band, which obviously numerically couldn't be possible.

Right. But your town had a thing.

Yeah, Bob Seeger was the king or Ted Nugent, but no one ever claimed to have played in Ted Nugent's band for whatever reason.

Oh, that's sad.

Every small town has a thing. It's interesting. The thing in my town was like, so and so knows Bruce, which means I know Bruce.

Yeah, sure. Bruce Springsteen. He's got to be God there. Mom was a music teacher. What's her music background?

She just always loved music, and she was my first piano teacher. Four years old? Yeah, four. Wow. Yeah. That's right.

There's more coming.

He does his research. She taught me when I was four years old. Then I went to other teachers who would make you read music. That's how you learn to play. You read the music and you play what's on the page.

Why didn't mom want to tackle that part of it?

Because she knew that I had this special ability to hear a song back then with tapes and CDs. This is a CD in my mind. I would listen to it and I'd memorize it, and then I'd be able to play it back.

You could just play it.

It was just from listening to it.

Did she think she had a fucking prodigy on her hands?

I think so. I definitely won't call myself that, but how you're spitting out facts about me right now because you read a sheet or you went online and you memorized them. That's the same way I always approach sound. From a young age, I thought that was just part of being human. You study for a vocabulary test, you're going to memorize a definition of whatever. Plethora. Plethora.

Most hated word.

Casic vocabular means many.

That's a cornucopia. Cornucopia. I'm going to memorize the definition of that.

Horn of plenty. That's the definition. Absolutely.

You passed the vocabulary test. But I always equated sound as something physical that you could hold or see.

You have that synesthesia.

It's not that.

It's a little like that.

I don't see any colors, though. I don't look at this nice forest green wall and think, Well, that sounds like a Frank Ocean song. I just look at music very literally. I would listen to Bye, Bye, Bye by in sync and be like, Okay, that's an A flat minor. And I'm doing this tonight. And then it goes to the… And then the pre-chorus goes to E major. F sharp major, on and on and on. If I had a piano, I'd play it.

And is that pleasurable for you or is it a maddening? Yeah, it's pleasurable, right? Pleasurable. I bet you're cracking the code a bit.

Control. I think music can move any room. This is why I write music. I've always wanted to be responsible for changing the vibe in any room if there needed to be a vibe change or make something sadder if it was that time of the show. Now I play shows. You know how musicians always an hour and a half into the show, that's when the acoustic guitar comes out. I'm like, All right, we're going to slow things down a little bit now.

We're going to give everyone a little break so that we can go fucking hard for that encore, right? We need to recharge.

Hit the snare, boom. And you're right back into it. Phil Collins, Genesis.

So studio.

Exactly. Can you imagine four slow songs, and then you hear a Sousou Studio just out of nowhere. It just makes you want to get up out of your chair. How did you make people get up out of their chair? You hit the first… It sounds like 1999. It does. It does sound like it.

I wonder who was first.

I think Prince was first. Yeah, he's first.

That makes sense. Yeah, he's always first. I just saw this. This is crazy. I guess Prince had had some success, but middling success. Of all things, he went a Bob Seeger show. Have you seen this?

No, I haven't. But I remember one controversy, that album. People didn't get it right away.

He could play clubs, and he was making a living. But he went to this Bob Seeger concert, and he was with a friend of his or a producer, and he said, I want to play to an arena like this. What is this guy doing that I'm not doing? And he said, he's writing ballads, and you're not writing any ballads. And he came home after watching Bob Seeger, and he wrote Purple Rain. Wow. Wrote some of it. Then he went to a club and he played it and he improbed this 25 minutes session of that song and kept the pieces that ended up in that song, which is a very long song. I want to say it's an eight or nine minutes song, but weirdly inspired by seeing the success of Bob Seeger and then cracking that he needed to do ballets.

What's that thing called? That people, do they write it down? Manifestation. I think a lot of musicians' manifestation is just through sound.

What I like about it, too, is I think we have these really fantastical notions of genius, and it's just like, oh, Prince knew how to be Prince. No, Prince knew how to do something. Then he saw Bob Seeger, and then he incorporated that, and then probably 80 other things he incorporated.

The genius of Prince was that he knew what to subtract. Sometimes I have trouble doing it. I had to remind myself that... Because without getting too muso-musical, because I know that everybody that listens and watches, isn't listening to music 24/7. Charlie, you're way too concerned with what people are going to be interested in.

You let me worry about that. Okay. You be passionate about what you're passionate about.

This is the place to get a little geeky.

Yeah. Okay. I love it. Remember Kiss by Prince? There used to be an acoustic guitar in that song. There might be one buried in the track at the very end, but right now it's just… It's just drums and the little background vocals overdubbed. But there was an acoustic guitar layered in there, and Prince was like, There's too much going on. He side-chain compressed, keyed the acoustic guitar to a hi-hat, and then the rhythm that the hi-hat was playing, the sound of a drum hi-hat. Every time the drummer hit the hi-hat, the acoustic guitar sound would trigger, which is how you got the… It's the hi-hat.

Oh, wow.

That's what it made. That's the hi-hat, but the acoustic guitar is opening up every time the hi-hat gets hit.

Wow. Okay, so mom got you onto the piano. It's funny, though, that she turned you over to somebody because I keep hearing from people. The good advice for parents is do not try to teach your kid shit. Just turn them over to a pro because kids don't want to learn from their parents. Really? Did you like learning from mom?

I loved learning from my parents. My dad, he's a builder and appreciates music but isn't in it every day like I am. I would just love asking him questions like, What's a foundation to a house? How do you know when it's ready to be painted? I have such a sophomoreic understanding of how a house, to this day, I still really don't understand it.

Did he not make you get out there and fucking clean up the site and run cable?

One time, he made me do it because I cheated on a math test. Punishment. I had to clean all day, and I was so miserable. I was just kicking the dirt, making little rhythms out of my feet. He came back to the house, it was completely dirty instead.

It's like this kid's fucking.

I think if you know, If you know your kid is going to do something- Is artsy? Yeah, you're not going to be like, Build this house, please.

Well, I think my parents knew I was artsy and musical when I went to Catholic school, which meant I went to Catholic Church. That was the deal. I would hear the same music, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord. I would hear the same music over and over every Sunday, sometimes three times a week. Back to the thing where I could hear a song and just memorize it, the thing that I thought everybody could do, I remember one day, the church organist didn't show up. I looked at everybody and like, Don't put the tape on. I've memorized it because I heard it so many times, and everyone looked at me like an alien. What age? This was 11. Okay, great. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 11 or 12.

What could make a service better than a cute little 11-year-old popping up and filling in on the organ?

On the organ. But also everyone's like, What do you mean you memorized it?

Get out of here, freak. He's been touched by the devil.

Yes. I played the whole mass from memory. It wasn't like a cocky thing. I It's just like, I've heard enough times I know how to do it, right? Everybody. My parents are like, Okay, we're going to go get your brain tested, see what's going on up there. And then I went to school in New York City.

Well, jazz enters the equation at seven or 10?

Ten years old. You're good. Thank you.

Ten. And then you go to a jazz camp, right? You go to Count Basie.

Went to Count Basie Theater in Red Bank, New Jersey, home of Count Basie. That's why I say New Jersey is low-key musical.

Yeah. What jazz do as a medium for you? Because I guess what I'm curious about right now, it sounds like your musical journey is like, I can hear this, I can replicate it. It's pleasurable to be able to execute that. But when does passion enter it or when does curiosity enter it?

The moment pop music was introduced into my life. When I say pop music, I meant pop music of the '70s, like when my parents were kids listening to James Taylor. I remember hearing Caroline In My Mind by James Taylor, and then hearing a Luther Vandros record. It was the R&B side of things, but I just called it pop music. Then in the early 2000s, I'd hear Lucky by Britney Spears. Oh, yeah. Just hearing those Max Martin drums and the very Swedish type songwriting and combining everything together. It was the pop music that made me realize, Oh, I want to make the music that moves people because my parents put on this James Taylor record, and it made the car ride so much better to North Jersey.

In my mind, I'm going to Carolina. Okay, so pop is what gets you on fire.

I'm listening to jazz and thinking, I'm going to learn as much jazz as I can and marry it into pop music. Then I found out that I was not the first to have that idea. That was all of Quincy Jones's music.

When you were in class, not with your mom, when you went to another teacher, and I know this is going to be hard for you because you don't want to brag, but was the teacher like, Dude, you got a real gift?

Yeah, they did say that. How did you know that I have such a fear of bragging?

I can tell you're That's so sweet. I think you're very cognizant of what people think of you.

Sometimes to a fault. I'm getting better at it. I think a lot of people take my... If someone sings off key, I just don't know how to not wince. It's involuntary. At 34, I'm getting a lot better at it. It's almost like a nervous tick a little bit. Sure. But I think people obviously would get offended by that.

Sure. That's different then.

Well, that's different. But I understand you're like, I'm hurting people's feelings, and I don't mean to be hurting people's feelings. I don't want people to think I'm a bad person or something. Can people read you the wrong way and then you feel bad about it?

Yeah, that's a whole different thing to go down. I definitely think people have read me the wrong way, but I don't know. Didn't people find Mozart annoying? Not that I'm comparing myself to Mozart. No, probably.

I think most musical geniuses have been roughhangs, with the exception of a few. I'm misunderstood.

I'm not going to say Rob Hanks. I think people think like, Oh, these pop stars, they put you in a box. They think you're going to be whatever they think. Then if you're not that, they're either disappointed or they're like, Oh, he's an asshole, or everyone has to come with their idea of you.

2014, when I signed my record contract, I had all intentions of coming to Los Angeles to produce music for other artists. I didn't think that I was going to be the artist. Then overnight, I became the artist after the song See You Again, being in the Fast and Furious movie and having a couple of my own singles. Suddenly, I'm the artist. But I just became an artist overnight, and I had a lot of not great people advising me incorrectly, Say this to garner up this fake controversy, and that way people will your music. Every classic music industry faux pas, I think I fell into. Having a bad business manager.

Oh, you know we're going to get there. We're going to get there. I want to earmark that. But my defense of it, what makes an incredible musician is that they see and hear something new that no one else saw and heard. To think that that person gets to have that experience a la carte, only when it serves them. You have to recognize they're operating at a little bit outside of the thing, which allows them to tap into something we wouldn't have thought of. That's what it's about. I think you've seen a lot of musicians over the years treat the angst that comes with that with booze and drugs. Most of our great geniuses, they're medicating. It's a lot to ask someone to be a visionary and then for the rest of the day, just be normal. That's not how it works. Wow.

I feel like a lot of artists would appreciate you saying that, too, because you get all this success. No one really wants to hear about your problems. But imagine hearing everything at 200% volume. Yeah, that's what I hear every single day. I get really startled. My poor wife, she came in and I was working on something. I was working on it really, really loud. She said, Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. I turned around, she really startled me. I just was really silent. She was like, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to startle you, and I just started crying. I don't know why.

You're sensitive, dude.

But I get down on myself because I'm about to have a kid and I don't want to freak the kid out.

No, your kid will probably be sensitive. If you're someone who embraces it and is not ashamed of it and can be an example that you can totally be a sensitive person and live in this world. It's a beautiful thing. Do not correct the thing. Let the kid see it's okay to be exactly how you are.

You almost took a tree out.

You fell under the tree.

I'm sensitive, too.

Into your eucalyptus tree over here.

Prince is freaky all the time. Of course he is. And he's on opiates. Yeah, of course he is. You're not getting that whole volume of work.

I think maybe in the beginning of tour, dabbled in having a drink after a show. But thank God, I never I got into any of that because my brain already feels like it's on drugs without anything. It's a lot to be on stage. It's depressing sometimes having just got off stage where 50,000 people are cheering you on, and then you just maybe have two days off and you're jet lagged. You might be in a different country, different state, and you're searching for that dopamine hit.

It's literally chemical, though. It's not even like, oh, it's like an emotional. It's chemical. The adrenaline is high, and it wipes out very quickly. Your body is trying to figure out a way to get some homeostasis. It's like, I'll drink a little bit to get back up to even.

Even a few weeks ago, post Golden Globes, we had a decompress. It's like, okay, that was a lot of attention. That's a very heightened arousal setting.

And now what? Maybe that's why people stay central in LA, where it's always something to get a hit from. Yeah. Oh, boy, that's dark.

Okay, so back to school. Now, I'm imagining you're living two different worlds. Anytime you're pursuing music, you're probably loved and appreciated. And then the transition to school, no one gives a fuck at school that you have this gift, right?

There were a lot of teachers that didn't like me. There were people who were supportive. There was one band teacher named Clem De Rose, I believe he's passed on 10 years ago. He used to work with Nelson Riddle and Count Basie and lead the big band. My mom and my dad were always my biggest supporters. They were like, You need to do this and play all the things you are. You are the known as this string time. Those core changes, like all nice and how David Foster plays the piano, how Bill Evans plays the piano. He used to do this for this guy in New Jersey on a Tuesday afternoon. I got into the jazz camp, and it was my biggest accomplishment ever. He was very supportive. I met a couple of teachers who weren't so supportive.

But I'm imagining your peers there, they like your talent because they're other musical kids. But then you're going to a New Jersey Elementary School in junior high, and I can't imagine there. That's what I'm saying. Are you plopping back and forth into a place you're appreciated and then a place where you're suffering?

I'm plopping back and forth. I never suffered. Just no one really understood me in high school.

I heard you were a bit bullied.

A teensy bit. Never shoved in lockers or anything like that. Just a lot of emotional distress that I might still carry with me, the needing to please people constantly and having a fear of talking too much. Much that might have started in high school. But I also enjoyed high school. It wasn't the worst thing in the world for me. I just preferred being in the music world.

Yeah. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert.

If you dare.

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That's like reading a book with most of the pages torn out.

Yeah, or paying for a coffee that's one-fifth full.

Yuck.

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In Microsoft, we're at 97, print out all the little CD labels, go door to door. But I just always wanted to make an album. I was always obsessed with making an album, seeing the celebrity in sync CD, seeing the Millennium Backstreet Boys CD. I wanted to make an album, not for myself, but for other artists.

At 17, this is also ambitious. At 17, you start a YouTube channel.

Charlie's Vlogs. This was the day and age of Tumbler and and blogging.

That was a whole era.

That was a whole era. I went to VidCon, meeting up with creators who I still am in contact with today. I fell in love with the Internet, and I noticed in the early days of YouTube, there was a lack of musicianship. It was all sketch, comedy, smosh, and those guys are still around today, too, killing it. But there was a lack of musicians. So I thought, why not make some homemade music videos? It sounds stupid because everybody does that now on TikTok, but nobody was doing it back then. Yeah.

But the ambition part is you're not only doing your own vlog with your own comedy sketches in your own, you're doing a lot of acoustic covers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then you start creating jingles and music for other people's YouTube shows, right?

Most of the time not because I wanted a pair of Ray Bands, and I didn't want to ask my parents for money. Sometimes if the YouTube channel had a lot of subscribers, when subscribers meant something, I would just ask for them to shout me out on their channel, and then I would get subscribers. I was writing a lot of music for a lot of random people at the time.

Yeah. Then you get into Berklee School of Music, and if everyone else is as dumb as me. That is not Berkeley out here. No, you'd be surprised.

That's Berklee in Boston. No, you'd be surprised. A lot of people get confused.

I thought, Oh, he went to Berkeley. And I was like, Why is it spelled with two E's and not a Y? And then I realized, Oh, it's a- Very prestigious music school.

Boston Music School. Yeah, it's a music school in the Back Bay in Boston, Massachusetts. I had so much fun there.

Did you feel seen there?

I did. You found your crew?

I found my crew. What's funny is I always danced around the classes. I'm sure they would hate to hear that, but I wasn't learning how to wrap cables. I have a music production and engineering degree, which is great, but I never went to the beginnings of that class. A good example is I knew I didn't have to book studio time at 3: 00 in the morning to record a drummer. I could just go on YouTube with this program called isotope, isolate the drums out of this one song, put them on the grid in Pro tools, and then take someone else's assignment and layer it on top of it, and now it sounds like I went to the studio at three o'clock in the morning, but I don't have bags under my eyes. Wow.

What cover gets Ellen's attention?

September of 2011, that was the Someone Like You, the Adele song, the cover of that. And it's so funny, I ran into the a couple hours ago who actually called me and said that I was going on that program at the time.

Not Andy?

No, not Andy. Her name's Ellen Rocamora. Oh, yeah. We know Ellen. She's so sweet.

She is the sweetest.

She called me at 19 years old and was like, We want to fly you out on Jet Blue. I was like, I still love Jet Blue. To Los Angeles, and I stayed at the Sheridan Universal. Sure. Off Lancashem, I think. Classic. I was like, wow, I've never been in such a nice hotel. It was September. It was getting cold in New England, but it was warm here. It's our hottest month. I couldn't believe it. I remember Jimmy Iveen, Larry Jackson, Ellen, the This is, again, 2011, officially a long time ago, saying, Would you like to be signed to a record contract?

To 1111? Yeah. Did you know that was the name?

God, you know everything.

Well, she loves 1111.

So does my wife. She loves 1111.

It's the number.

Jan Anaston, too. She's got tattooed on her.

Jan Anaston also likes it. Really?

It's a good club to be in, the 1111 Club.

We're missing the train, I think. We got to get on the 1111.

I got dropped from 1111.

Then Emily Luther. Luther. She was singing it with you, right?

Yeah, she was a student at the time at Berklee, she sang the song with me. She's from Rhode Island. I haven't thought about that in a long time.

Yeah. You get signed based on having come on the show and sang with Emily.

Yeah, as a duet. I I was like, Okay, cool. But this is the part of my life where I was still lying to myself. I didn't want to be an artist. I was like, I'll just be the producer and she'll be the artist. Then in 2012, I went to Malibu and made a not so great sounding album that I don't think anyone will hear. She would sing it and sounded good. But I remember the producer was like, Why don't you stay an extra week and work on the tracks with me? I was like, Oh, my God. I was salivating because it was this beautiful Ramirez Canyon, and it was wonderful. It made me fall in love with California.

You had all the toys at your disposal, I'd imagine.

Oh, my God. I've never been in such a nice studio. Overlook the Ocean. Went to Nobu Malibu.

Oh, wow. Yeah.

To Bowie Sushi. Is that still a thing anymore?

I don't know about Bowie Sushi, but yeah, Nobu, Malibu.

That's still a thing.

That's the first hit free drug.

Absolutely. My mind was blown. So that didn't end up happening. I went back to college and ended up graduating.

Were you crestfallen with the result of that?

I was not devastated because I was so excited to I experienced junior year of college. Oh, okay. I was like a cocky little shit. I was like, I'm on TV. Yeah. I was feeling myself a little bit.

Did it convert to anything on campus? Were girls more interested in you?

I think so. Yeah, sure.

It works.

It normally does work.

Yeah, it's pretty effective. I found a mic.

Every classic male singer, everything ever. Everyone was like, Wow, Charlie has 100,000 YouTube subscribers. I had, for a brief amount of time, a very inflated ego, I would say, because I didn't have that in high school. I was always odd man out a little bit, the man on the side. I was stoked. I sold a show. 200 people showed up, like real fans and all from Massachusetts showed up at this little café. I was like, Wow, I just sold out a show. It was a good time.

If you deny yourself that, what's the fucking point? I mean, you should go through all the... You got to feel it. Mm-hmm. Post getting booted from 11: 11, you had a bit of doldrums between the Ellen excitement, the selling of the show, graduating them, Pitbull, because that's 2015.

The thing about going to a music college, a lot of people's cloughs with it are that you get your degree, and then it's like, now what? I don't really believe you necessarily need a piece of paper to say that you're a musician. You didn't just come to Nashville or here. But I had my piece of paper and I moved back home and I was like, Okay, I should just do what I was doing before when I got dropped from the Interscope label. I will just go to every publisher on Broadway in New York City, and I will pitch my music. I waited outside a record labels doors. Even the record label that I'm signed to now, Atlantic Records, I would wait out maybe five hours. I would meet people at this random studio in Brooklyn. I would just go anywhere where I could make music and then go back to my parents house at like midnight, take that boat and I was talking about before.

Have a couple of Vaca-Stollies.

Yeah, absolutely. A couple of whiskey sours. Just get back to editing and just hope that someone would cut my song, meaning sing my song. One day, I got an email from an artist and repertoire director on Kauanga Boulevard, and they invited me out to that studio, and I just wrote See You Again. It's an anticlimate end to that story.

Well, no, Pitbull is in there.

He wasn't physically there. That happened a couple of days after. Oh, after? The funny thing about that song, if I'm remembering, it was called Celebrate. Yes, it is. I only wrote one line. I wrote, Tonight, we're making history because history didn't rhyme with celebrate. I was like, Oh, just say history. Now it arrives with celebrate. That was my contribution to the song.

Okay.

Damn, I haven't heard people bring that one up in a long time. I go down memory lane.

Not to be confused with celebrate. It would feel so fun if we took a holiday. That's such an amazing song. What if she had said Incorporated History and to Celebrate?

History. That was genius, you speak of level of songwriting there. But I'd say my biggest first contribution to someone's career artistically was for an artist named Trey Songs. It was called Slow Motion, and it was made for the club. I had just written See You Again, which is a piano ballad. And then slow motion. I had just gotten out of the studio with DJ Mustard. He was going on his run. I had gotten this snap from him, and I put this club record together. My discography is all over the place.

Yeah, that's so cool.

So when you did See You Again, again, your aim at that point was to be a songwriter and a producer. So how did you end up... You had sang a demo, I guess, for that?

I sang the demo, and what was described to me is that nobody could capture the original feeling of the demo. I believe the person who came closest to it was Chris Brown. I remember hearing that and really liking it. But at the end, I swear, I think it was Vin Diesel's call. Really? That he wanted me on the song. Such a weird story. Yes. I think he vouched for me. I don't know if that's 100% Jersey. Is he from New Jersey? I don't think he is.

He feels like he's from New Jersey.

I think his manager is from New Jersey. I'm just going in the corners of my brain of useless information. That's how I ended up on the song. And it was so last minute. We were filming a music video a week before the movie was set to come out, and I wasn't even originally in the video. They had to do a second shoot day because that's the day the movie company was like, Oh, he's in it now. He needs to be in the music video.

Okay, so now that you're singing on it, do you quickly readjust your game plan?

Yeah, I'm like, Now I'm an artist.

Great. Now that song is enormous three Grammy nominations, a Golden Globe nomination, and now you're really off to the races. You're signed to Atlantic at this point.

I'm signed to Atlantic at this point. Everybody wants to write with me. When they say overnight, I felt it overnight. It was actually overwhelming.

Well, that's what I'm so curious about is that's a lot to readjust to.

And you're young. Yeah, I was 23. I suddenly had money to go get an apartment on 7950 West Sunset Boulevard, the corner of sunset and style.

Have you ever been there? Perfect. That feels serendipitous.

That feels like a song, a lyrics.

I had an apartment with carpet. It was wonderful. I would just go to the studio every day. I found myself at the Golden Globes the next year. It was all the things I would see on extra, extra. I was suddenly part of. My mom would fill me in on everything as if I weren't there.

Yeah, moms like to do that. They do it for a while, and then luckily, they tire of it, and then they stop entirely.

Do people even watch TV anymore? That's the thing. Yeah, exactly.

What's next?

After that year.

You're starting to collaborate with a ton of people I'm sure you could have never have imagined even seeing at a cafe, and yet now you're working with them.

Who are you like, Oh, my God.

I was excited just to get in with everybody, big or small. I remember Mike Will, producer, came, told me he wanted to work with me. I remember Fergie told me she wanted to work with me. I remember Sean Mendez wanted to write a song with me. It's all over the place, but I had to realign my thinking. I had to be an artist now. The thing that lacked in the very beginning of my career, it was consistency. I had a song called Marvin Gay, which is a fine song. With Megan Trey. With Megan Trey. That was also big. I had no album. All of a sudden, I had two big songs, See You Again and Marvin Gay, both working on the other side the spectrum with no album. So I had to scramble and get every A-list writer to help me craft this album. And my first album, for that reason, was inconsistent all over the place. And then in the ninth hour, I heard this little loop in my… It's weird. To write a song, you have to not write a song. You have the whole song in your head and you just reverse engineer it.

So I had… And suddenly They just, We don't talk anymore. I was like, We don't talk anymore. Am I describing it right? It sounded like the song was out already. It was on the radio, but it was playing in my head.

You're trying to hear the lyrics.

But I had to go to Japan the next day. I'm making the song on the airplane in the trains. I'd say an hour before we had to turn the album, then I turned that song in. How about that? All these other songs that they got all these other people to write for me didn't resonate, but the one that came from here resonated. Yes.

How were you at collaborating? That's such a specific...

It used to be very bad.

What things got in your way?

Well, again, post-Ellen junior year of college, I feel like I know everything. I don't need to collaborate with anybody. Just the frontal lobe, not developed young man mentality.

Literally not.

Literally not. I think I know everything. I remember, you know Kara Diagouardi? Yeah. She was a judge on American Idol for a while. She was a prolific songwriter. She actually taught at Berklee. Now we're going back to 2013. I remember showing her a song, and she was like, This melody is great. These lyrics are ass. You need to get together with someone who knows how to write lyrics. I wrote this email. I'm like, How dare you? This is someone who has so much more success than me still. I'm writing this scathing email like, You have no idea. I'm going to show you.

Well, and around this time, she famously said, His songs are bigger than him in a nutshell. He has these enormous songs, but he himself is not big enough for these songs. I'm paraphrasing, but I did read that line. That's fair, right? It is fair. You got to take some minutes to learn how to become a pop star.

I feel like people are just starting to get to know me personally now, but I don't think I let them in. Again, I'm a people pleaser. It's coming up again. I really cared about the music first and maybe stemming from the high school stuff. I never thought that people would actually care about me. They weren't interested in what I had to say unless it had a catchy little bop to it. But now I find that the tables have turned a little bit. People want to know me. Maybe that's where we are in society. I don't know.

Yeah, I think so.

I'm going to disappoint you now, and I'm going to go to my notes. Okay.

Wow. That's fine. Good for you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, Perez Hilton and winning, Can You Sing? That's interesting. Perez Hilton. Oh, Perez Hilton.

No, I mean, that's an anticlimatec thing. That's what got the attention. Can you believe that? A hundred thousand views, and that's what went viral at the time. Wait, it was a video?

It was a video that got a hundred thousand views, and that's what went viral.

Oh, right.

That counted as viral.

That counted as viral back then. Now, it's like you're a failure if you got a hundred. I know. A hundred thousand people is still a lot of people. Yeah. Crazy.

It's so true. Okay, so attention happens. I'm curious, now we're to the part where we earmark because now you're having to grow into pop stardom because attention is enormous. It's still I was looking up stuff on Spotify, and this is streaming very well. Oh, billions of astronomical amount of streams from that song.

Song reached a lot of people.

And you put out voice notes, and then you go on tour. I already know if we fast forward ahead, you said at one point, I don't like anything I put out in 2019 because I was trying to be a cool guy. If I can project, it's like things that were already impossible are happening. You really start opening up your mind to the notion that maybe anything's possible. It's very easy to go off the rails because already things are happening that were way outside of what you were expecting. Why can't I be Justin Timberlake? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, thus far, I've got the songs.

Yeah, you're involved in cool things.

I don't even know if I was trying to be another artist. I think it was the crew of people I was hanging around. I am impervious to anything bad. Everything I touch is great. Therefore, that extends musically as well. But that fated away in 2019. Maybe my frontal lobe started developing. It wasn't fully there yet, but I'm always exploring, and that was the wrong thing to explore. I should have explored something else musically rather than try to talk differently in interviews and make up stories.

Yes. And how are you adapting to, I know you're getting attention from the proverbial cheerleaders, so pop stars like you, and you're now with them. And you have this panic of like, do they know I'm not really supposed to be here? How are you security-wise in these relationships at that period?

I just think that's why those relationships never worked out, because deep down, the New Jersey boy getting advice from his mom and dad and wanting to make Christmas CDs was still at the nucleus of it all.

Yeah, the kid from high school.

It was affecting the epidermis, but it wasn't reaching down past the dermis. I was showing up to every restaurant like Craig Hugs, which is a very good restaurant, by the way.

It is a good restaurant.

Monica loves it.

Going back to the relationship stuff, they never came into fruition because I couldn't get past a certain point. I think maybe I wasn't honest with a lot of people. I wasn't honest with myself.

I think of Camilla Caballo.

She's so talented.

She's so wonderful. But as I'm talking to her, I'm realizing, Oh, yeah, she's also a kid from Miami, and this persona is the most confident thing in the world. We all look at that and think like, Oh, well, they've been popular their whole life, and they're not. Sean wasn't.

I toured with Sean when he just got started, although he did project into superstardium from an early-he made the transition.

Yeah. It's not like what you trained for in high school, perhaps. No.

What we experience is like 0. 1%. It's not normal to get off stage and then just be alone. It's not normal to be looking left and right and wondering who's going to be running at you. It's not a normal feeling, but the young, immature part of me back then was feeding into that because I just totally didn't believe that anyone was going to listen to my music as an artist just based on the music alone. I swear I'm not fishing for compliments in this green room. I just truly didn't believe that people were just going to buy my music because they liked it. There needed to be some catch. I better say this stupid thing in this interview because that's what's going to make people holler and, Oh, he put out a song? I guess I'll listen to it. That's how my brain used to think. How do you know?

What the fuck? How How would you know? At the height of all this massive success, what was happening emotionally?

Very depressed. It doesn't matter how much success I had. It's almost like the more success that I had, the sadder I got.

Were you feeling fraudulent?

Yeah, I was. I stopped feeling fraudulent two years ago. It takes a minute. Crazy. I would be at these Grammys, these Golden Globes, and I would be raising my voice and putting the game show voice on and then going back home alone and just being by myself and then I'm being real with myself and just being so physically exhausted from lying.

What did you use to soothe?

The occasional Xanax, which I had to completely get rid of, and the-Attention of girls? Yeah, I'm sure. That's a nice salve. That wasn't making me happy either.

More fraudulence.

More fraudulence. These were amazing girls, too, who I had an amazing time with, and I just was lying to myself because I knew the person for me who was always there and seeing all of my antics play out in the world is my wife now. She stuck by me and was there the entire time.

Because she's a family friend?

She grew up one town over from me. My history is like a country song. It's like a small town, small town. Imagine her turning on the TV or going on Snapchat and seeing me participate in all this tomfoolery, and she still saw through it and saw the real me. I keep pointing here like it's in my gut, but I guess it is in my gut. But one day I saw her with somebody I knew they were serious, and I was like, Oh, my God, I'm officially going to lose her because of all my antics, me being reckless. I found myself because of Brook, my wife.

That's so sweet. I was going to ask, so how do you call your way out of this bizarre gilded cage you've put yourself in in this fancy apartment?

It just happened one day. It's the worst answer ever. I think on my 30th birthday, I started to catch a glimpse of everyone at Delilah right now. I met last month. There's four family members here. What's going on? Yes, the birthday party. Yeah, and a bunch of Irish exits. Chicken fingers are good, but there's no warmth. Yeah.

At the birthday party. It's interesting. I went to a birthday party of someone I will not mention, but I did look around and I was like, Yeah, man, this is a stunning guest list. I even remember when we were invited, Chris and I was like, It's weird to be at this person's birthday party. We don't know them that well, but we're going to go. It's also a professional relationship. Then when I went, it was just like, Yeah, everyone was a star. I thought, Not one of these people is a friend. No one has time in this room to be friends' friends.

But those parties are fun. Sure. Why am I going to lie and say that I've never had fun at course?

But I was depressed for the person's birthday.

Absolutely. At 30 years old, it was at the Peppermint Club, not Delilah, but been there, too. I lived in Truesdale. You did it all. I did it all. I look around and I'm like, No one cares about me here. The person who does care about me won't speak to me right now because she's finally had enough. Then was a year of I'm not going near any of that. I can't do it. Everyone's amazing. I've met some amazing people, but this no longer works for me. If I want to graduate to this next important level in my life, and I think my music was suffering, too. It didn't sound as good.

Well, nothing was coming from really truth.

You would have had to figure out how to write a song that relayed fraudulence, which is not what I'm sure you thought was going to hit the top 40.

It never works. Every song that's ever resonated with millions and millions of people has come from here. I wasn't fake, but everything around me was fake, and you are a product of your environment. Yeah. Of course, I wasn't making great stuff.

How did you begin wooing her back to your side.

When I said that I was going to show up to her apartment in New York, I actually got on that jet blue, second jet blue mention today. I love jet blue. I love jet blue. I said I was going to New York. You know how people around here were like, Oh, yeah, let's get together next week. I could be down for that. I don't judge people for still saying that, but I took that out of my vocabulary. I made sure that I was punctual, and if I said I was going to do something, I was really going to do it. I showed up with flowers, and we went on a date. We had never been on a date before. We've known each other for our entire life. We went to this restaurant, Lillia in Brooklyn.

That's supposed to be so good.

So good. Consistently wonderful. I mean, all the food in Brooklyn is so good. Shout out Mark Lucale.

I have to say quickly, you all's generation, no one in my age group growing up knew about a restaurant. Maybe this is good. I'm also from a blue-colored thing, but I do think generationally, well, there's been articles about the avocado toast generation.

Food hit a new level. It's like a scene or It's art.

Well, the healthy thing is your generation seems to recognize that joy comes from experiences and not possessions, which for the older people are like, They're so reckless with their money, but it's like, great because you've got a snowblower you bought. That's true. I do think it's healthy, but it's so foreign to me. No one my age knows 12 great restaurants. But I do think your average is your baseline interest in a great restaurant has just really gone up.

That's true. Well, that's very nice. Give a compliment. In our generation.

I think it's great. You'll do a lot of great shit. You drink less, you save money better. Well, some people do. Well, not you. I'm an exception. You're a black mark on your generation.

Okay, you took her to the restaurant.

Took her to the restaurant, and then I was just consistent. Then a week later, she said she was having a birthday party for her brother, and I'm here living in Beverly Hills. I'm like, I'll take a night flight. She was like, No, you won't. I'm like, Yeah, I will. I did. Just to prove to myself that I could actually commit. It took a year.

Was it hard to resist wowing her? If I was in your situation, I'm trying to win over my hometown girl, I would have been really tempted to like, Oh, your birthday? Yeah, I'll be there. Then I would have planned something way too spectacular. We're going to Paris. I would have brought an elephant or some shit. The last thing she wanted. I think it would have been tempting to go like, Let me show you what life I can provide us.

That's what I did with all the other relationships. That's why they didn't work out because that's not who I am. Where I thrive is showing that I'm a normal person, and that's how she always knew me. I was presenting this extravagant, larger than life. I'm going to Paris in five hours. Get on this plane with me. It's just us on the plane. It sounds made up, and it really didn't do anything.

Yeah, I know someone was telling me a story about their first date their future husband was flying on the Concord to Paris as a first date. I was like, I don't know. Where do you go from there? How can you possibly evaluate? I could fucking hang with anybody on a Concord flight to Paris. I mean, I can't evaluate whether they- Pipe in that.

I guess.

I was like, Well, you're moving.

That's what they would say about the bachelor and the bachelorette. No wonder those can't work. All their dates are that. There's too heightened. That's not normal light.

That's why I like to work in LA. I always love LA. La It changed my life. But that's why my wife and I live in Santa Barbara now, because we wake up, we go for walks.

But you're not seeing billboards of all your peers doing all those things.

We have streetlights.

Yeah. It's just normalcy. That's nice.

It's quite nice. Then if we need to go to X, Y, and Z, we just drive the sometimes 3 hours to get here.

Sometimes 80 minutes.

Sometimes 80 minutes.

It can be like, I don't even know. This isn't bad at all. Okay, so then 2021, you co-write and produce Stay with B Beaver. How does that come about?

Originally, it started out with Kid Leroy, my friend Blake Slackin, and Omar Fetty, two very talented songwriters. The song sat for a year because classic thing, no one believed it was a hit. Then Leroy had Beaver do a verse on it, and it lit the whole song up.

Tell me about Bieber as someone who knows music. I am just on the outside, and I don't technically know what's happening, but I know something very magical is happening.

Yeah, he's one of my favorite artists. He's incredible. I can't tell if he gets annoyed when I say that my favorite Christmas album is his Christmas album. But Journal's Purpose, because it's such an adjacent timeline to me experiencing everything for the first time. The Purpose album, Getting my first car in Thousand Oaks and listening to it, it means so much to me. I just think his voice is so wonderful.

He's got a Michael Jackson quality.

Yeah, he has a deep appreciation for R&B and always has in his melody writing, in his songwriting, he can always hear it. I think one of the best voices in pop.

So as a producer, clearly, you're in that session where he's working on it.

I wasn't present when he was recording his vocals. They were sent back to us, but it was a perfect vocal.

We're learning this. We just talked to Anderson Paak, who's like, my number one. So talented.

I just fucking worship that dude. Yeah, he's amazing.

And to find out how much of his music, like his song with Mac Miller, Dang, they didn't meet in person until they made the music video, and they already had a hit that they had written together. I didn't know that. I'm like, That's such a modern-day phenomenon. That couldn't have happened in the '70s or '80s.

No, it couldn't have. I mean, they were mailing DAT tapes to each other, even in the early 2000s. I didn't know that. I understand. He came into my studio at Conway one time accidentally, and he was so funny. He walked into the wrong room. He just lights up every room. What a light.

He does. You can't describe him and not use the edge of light.

One of my favorite songs I ever wrote was Stay. I love the little... I love that kick-snare combination. It's fun.

It's It got a grit to it, too.

It has distortion to it. Distortion, a heavily underused thing while producing music. And pop. To make the drums hit, you layer in a really crunchy kick-snare combination. So it sounds like... It sounds messy, but thin it out and then turn the volume down and place it on top of the super clean drums. You have the imperfect drums and the perfect drums.

You have the garnish. Absolutely. It's a garnish grit.

That's why vocals can't be all perfect pitch. I like that. He has the garnish of grit.

I just did it early. I wanted some validation for my wordsmithery. I know you're withholding. That's why we've been friends for so long. You know when to withhold.

I'm here to be honest. I don't think garnish of grit is necessarily the best thing you've come up with.

Well, it's mixed messages. Garnish and grit are diametrically opposed. We'll circle back.

I'll think about it for a little bit.

You'll think about it if you're going to keep that added or not.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, I'd be remiss if we didn't talk about then the most recent chapter, which is interesting, which is, and of course, you found your way there. But 2021, you start going hard on TikTok.

I sure do.

Was that a reclaiming of yourself? It was.

It was to show people that I don't make music just because it's my job. It affects me so viscerally. And one small change made into a song. If you re-record one little vocal, it could change the trajectory of the entire song. And I always thought that my job here was to teach that because my mom was a teacher, and maybe that's where I get it from. I was thinking to myself one day, why I show everybody what it's like to put some layers in songs? You start with the kick drum, start there, that's the foundation of your house, and then you add the bass, which is the other... Again, I still don't know how to build a house, but you put the wood on top of the foundation. The framing. There you go. Thank you. The framing. Then the windows and the nice paint, the nice lacered paint is like sprinkles on top. That's the reverb that you put at the very end of the record. How do I teach that in a very entertaining way? That video went viral. It got a lot more than 100,000 views.

Was it light switched?

Yeah, a silly song, but I always loved it when my teachers made the lesson entertaining, and I thought that was, in my opinion, an entertaining lesson where people understood where their favorite songs come from.

That's so cool. You were the young kid in your room and to find out. It's as simple as the order. Would I start at reverb? No, no. Let's keep that for that is the glaze. Even the order of things could be so helpful and breakthroughy for a kid who's trying to figure all this shit out in their bedroom. I think that's That's a very cool thing.

I just want people to know that they can come to Los Angeles and be inspired. But if you really wanted to make a record, all you have to do is pull up your phone and open Garage band. If you have a good idea, you don't have to book studio time. It's almost better if it sounds a little crummy because people will relate to it more because they have the same software on their phone.

Interesting.

Not to bring up, we don't talk anymore again, but that guitar was recorded on an iPhone. We recorded it in a studio and it sounded not great because it was too perfect, too clean. Everything needs to have a little distortion.

What's the Japanese word, Monica?

Oh, not wabisabi. Wabisabi. Not wabisabi. The other one, we always think it's wabisabi, and it's not wabisabi.

It's not imperfection, the art and beauty of imperfection.

Yeah, because we are imperfect beings, and we can maybe relate to art that is thus imperfect, not to sound like a philosopher.

Well, you wanted to sound human. No, it's true. It's why AI doesn't work on a lot of levels. It's too clean. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

This is the time for all artists, filmmakers, music makers, anything that involves art. This is the most important time to be as human as possible, because pretty soon, if you want an answer to something, I don't know if I'm right, but I feel like you're just going to be able to ask yourself the question. You're just going to know it right away. I know.

I know. Yeah, like a neural link set up. Yeah.

There's still going to be antiquated ways of making stuff, but it's going to be appreciated. People will appreciate human made. It's going to be of high value because I think for a while there, it wasn't.

Well, it's very interesting at first. My own arc with it, it's like when I'm first seeing these crazy videos, they're awesome. I'm like, Oh, my God, there's a raccoon driving a race car. It very quickly became just like white noise. Yeah, absolutely. I'm like, It's not very interesting, even though it was exciting at first.

Yeah, this is our opportunity to be as human as possible.

The whole point of art and conversation is the human exchange. So when you know it's not, you know it's all manufactured, I don't think us as humans can connect to it in the same way at all. Even if it's word for word the same, we know it's not genuine.

It's about fumbling over words, and maybe we speak at the same time, so we'll edit that out. This album that I just finished, that's going to be my fourth album, is a direct response to all the perfect music that you hear out nowadays. My sister was telling me she has two young kids, a boy and a girl, and they go to the cuteest school ever, and they were having a bubble party. They put a playlist together, an AI playlist of bubble music. I'm like, Just play Popcorn by New Edition. Play Britney Spears. Put some effort into making a playlist. I mean, sure, fine, but it's lacking heart. We need to put the heart back into art. That's why I made this album.

Can't spell heart without art.

Really good. That's the worst headline out of all this.

We're almost to whatever's clever. In 2024, I'm servicing my friend Monica right now.

I know it's coming. I know what I do.

Go ahead.

Taylor? Yeah. Okay, so she wrote the Lyric, right?

Yeah. The Lyric on the Tortured Poets Department was, We declared Charlie Pooth should be a bigger artist.

That was very nice.

Yeah. Tell me how you take that because My brain is so good at turning everything terrible. I could turn that terrible. What are you saying? I should have been bigger.

That is a huge compliment.

I think it's a huge compliment. I did actually think that was AI at first, but then I listened to it, and I listened to it a couple of times. Someone sent it to me right before it was supposed to come out, and I knew it was real because of her diction and the way that she sang it. Musically, it felt human enough for it to as human. I thought to myself, What does that mean? Do I need to open up more in my music? I feel like I do need to open up because that's why She's beloved has 100,000 people coming to every show is because everybody can relate to her very human lyrics. Maybe I need to not worry so much about, Oh, I hope this song is a hit, versus really put focus on, Let's be real here, and sing about things that I haven't sung about before. I have a song called I used to be cringe, which I don't believe anybody's heard yet, but it's disarming. It's like a nice acoustic guitar, but with a nice vocal melody and a choir. The lyrics is I used to be cringe. It's like, Why would you put that in a song?

I resisted it for a while, but then I kept hearing the Taylor Lyric and thought, I might need to.

That's lovely that it was inspiration. Exactly.

Absolutely. Personally, I think she meant what I think most people are going to think. If they know you very surface and they listen to this, they're going to think that same thing like, Wait a minute, this is a musical genius. And we've categorized him as this pop star, and that's not correct. I think that is what she's saying here.

How do you not resist calling her and going, Well, clearly you like me, so let's party. How do we not do something together? That would be my first selfish thought.

I just wrote her a thank you note, a handwritten thank you note, because I really did think it was such a nice thing. Took time to record that vocal. That was very, very nice.

Yeah, whatever is clever, we're already touching on it. I imagine you're now, as opposed to I'm a hit seeker. I am now going to attempt to self-examine and find these things that I actually care about and explore those.

Yeah, and hits might come out from that. I don't know.

We say in AA, we're in the show-up and work business, not the results business. I think that's a good model for everyone to live by, which is like, you do the thing you do and you just don't know the results, and that's that. I like that. How does one start this mining process?

I remember my collaborator, Bloodpop, came in and said, We need to make you feel a little uncomfortable to make something beautiful. He said, Have you ever written a song about your dad? I got very defensive. You don't know my dad. Why would I ever write a song about my family? What are you getting at? He was like, Your dad might want it one day. I was like, What does that mean? That was so weird. Then I spent all week thinking about it. Then my dad's mom lives to 94 years old, and she had passed, and I have this song suddenly for my dad. I was like, Wow, now I have something to play him. It's called Cry. It features Kenny It's awesome. Oh, yes.

Playing?

Yeah, playing the solo at about the two-minute mark in the song. Lyrically, it's about just telling somebody, You don't have to be an emotional brickwall. You don't always have to be the hero. You can show emotion to me. Not that he doesn't know that, but it's nice to have a reminder, especially a musical reminder. But I wrote that before that incident even happened. So once blood told me to write that, I was very open-minded.

Yeah, I said that blood pop is very, very involved in this. I'm totally ignorant on blood pop. Tell me about blood pop.

Works a lot with Caga. Also is a video game designer, a very smart person. He's obviously very talented and has made countless hits and really important bodies work for a lot of other artists. I'm always trying to musically explore, so I thought it would be a good idea.

Yeah, I would imagine from just this limited interaction of the last hour and a half, this is something that I have assigned to Phineas, whether it's real or not. It's like I watch that beautiful doc with he and his sister, and what I saw is is a big brother who's so loving and can handle all of her little imperfections and keep picking her up and pushing her forward. It's so beautiful. It blows my mind. I'm so moved by him. When I was asking, what's your collaborations experience at the beginning? It's like, I don't see you as having that skill set at that time. I also could see that you would really benefit from someone that would be like, No, we're going to definitely get more emotional here.

Yeah. Sometimes I need to be led into the right direction, which is probably why I'm a better artist than I am at an executive producer for another artist. I would always love to have a hand in another brilliant artist's work, but I don't know if I'm ever going to be the one that-Mines it out of them. Yeah, because I feel like I have such a long way to go, and I feel like I'm just starting my career in some way.

Also, I don't know that you get that technical aptitude. You don't get the whole fucking pie, right? So it's like maybe Finneas can't hear the thing and memorize a thing like you and here, that's a flat, this and that. And then he has this other thing. So It's like we try all the time to be everything. It's a waste of everyone's time. It's fine to have strengths. Then, yeah, to collaborate and bring in people that can help in that.

Like a thumbprint, no mind is alike. I work with Finneas one time, and he brought all these string samples. I didn't even think about including string samples in a song that we could write. There's singers that will suggest a different melody like Ryan Tedder, Out of One Republic, really talented producer. I'll sing him a melody, and he'll suggest something else that most of the time ends being better because I was so stuck on one thing, but he suggested one little change. It was really good. That is Max Martin. Max Martin, really wonderful producer, just did the Taylor album. I always want suggestions. I will never know everything.

Okay, last thing is, you're singing the national anthem at the Super Bowl this year.

Sure am.

Oh, cool. Now, I got to say, we just interviewed Chris St Ableton. No one has a right to be more confident than Chris St Ableton. He said, For sure, the most nerve-wracking experience of his professional career was singing the national anthem.

Really? Don't say that right now.

I had no idea.

No, that should be comforting if he's feeling fear.

No, I'm so confident. I have the whole arrangement in my head. Oh, good. My local newspaper, The Star Ledger, told me that I am the second New Jersey native to sing the national anthem, the first being- The boss. No, Whitney Houston. Oh, wow. Without giving too much away, I just musically know where I'm going with it.

And you're excited.

I'm excited. I picture an orchestra on the field. I picture a choir on the field, and just a tiny little keyboard that I'm not going to hide behind, but like a road, like a really warm road sound, like a road from the 1970s. Everything that's non-football related, I'm having at the 20-yard line. I just can't wait. I want to do it in D major, and I have it all in my head, and we can play this back after I do it and see if it was all right. But I think it's going to be in D major. There's going to be choirs, there's going to be an orchestra, and it's going to end like… All the string players are going to go… That's how I imagine it.

The fucking F6 teaser.

Can you imagine? Oh, mine. I got goosebumps just thinking of it now because it feels like I already did it. It's a similar thing with writing a song. Again, to write a song, you have to reverse engineer. I feel like I already did the performance, and now I'm going to just do it for real. And hopefully, I think I'm correct. I think that's what it's going to sound.

Oh, good.

I'm glad. I'm so excited to watch it.

Yeah. These things, as arbitrary or as manufactured as they seem, no, they're really special, cool things.

I always get lost in the music. I opened up for Billy Joel once. I was like, What's it like on stage? They're playing for a stadium every night. He's like, I don't know what I'm doing. I get lost in the music. I didn't know what he meant at the time. I now do the same thing. I get lost in the music. Isn't music so amazing?

Yeah. I just love it so much. Now, you're going to go out on tour in April with- I sure am. Whatever's clever. Yeah. You got a new baby coming. Is that that stressful?

It keeps me up at night, if I'm going to be completely honest. I have to go on tour right after the baby's born.

But they will come.

Is the baby going to travel?

Oh, yeah, they'll come.

Yes, because I'm going to tell you something. That feeling you have in the hotel will not be that. You will come off this energy thing, and then you will look at your little submarine sandwich that's in this stupid little swaddle.

Oh, my God. Then you'll go, Oh, fuck me.

This is actually way better than that, Irina.

I always want to find a perfect balance for Baby. I never wanted to be the Charlie show constantly because now there's another version of me, and he or she will grow up to be whoever they want to be. I don't want to be selfish and have it always be about me.

Our little kids, Kristen was doing movies all over, and we just all went as a little fucking caravan, and there's playgrounds everywhere. It's not until, and that is the time where you need to be on yourself, is like, Hey, once they have friends at a school, it's not cool to pull them out and fucking make them miss everything so they can be with you. That's the time. But you are five, six years out from that.

I never even thought about that. I appreciate the advice.

Yeah, let it rip. They love going everywhere. The more you travel with them, the better travels they are. Kids could sleep on airplanes. They didn't cry.

It's good for them. They get exposed to all kinds of things that they wouldn't be able to.

There's smells and sounds and different colored people and different accents and different languages.

That's important, the different colored people. For sure, as early as they can get I want to get the big headphones for the baby. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sure. Well, Charlie, this was delightful.

This was downright therapeutic. This was super fun.

That's what we like to hear. I do got to add, Whatever's Clever comes out on Lincoln's birthday. Ding, ding, ding, March 27th. It's a very special day for me.

It's a very special day for me. Right before flu season ends. How do I know this? I go to the OB/GYN every day.

Well, thanks for coming. This is a blast. Everyone, check out Whatever's Clever. Watch you on the Super Bowl, and go see you on tour.

Thank you very much for having me. You're welcome.

I sure hope there weren't any mistakes in that episode, but we'll find out when my mom, Mrs. Monica, comes in and tells us what was wrong. How was your first walk to work?

It was my first walk.

I mean, you used to walk to work.

First two-minute walk.

First two-minute commute to work. How about that? Thank you.

And I even got to bring my tea.

Why not? And look at this mug. What was the price tag on it?

I don't know, but it's good for today. It's gloomy out. So this mug has a rainbow coming out, and the sun's popping out of the clouds.

Peaking out.

Underneath.

Careful. I know.

There's a cloud, there's rain.

Don't lose your equilibrium. I know. I would have just looking up that you fell over.

I might.

Okay, so this is great. I have my first question about your new house, which is, is the gloom the same? It's raining for folks who don't know, and Los Angeles. Yes. And I open my French door, and I can smell the rain, and I meditate, and I journal. And then I'm just looking out at all the wet trees, and it's so beautiful. Yeah. You can now, too.

Did it change anything? Well, I can, but my alarm was on. I've set my alarm off a few times by accidentally opening the window. Well, purposely opening the window, but forgetting that I have set the alarm. It's really loud. So anyone who wants to rob me, it's not going to work. Bring your earplugs. It's not going to work out for you.

Do you have it on an app, though? My alarm? Yeah, you should. Instead of you having to find a keypad and all that to open your fucking window, you just pull your phone out of your pocket. Okay, well, another hurdle is we know and you don't like this about me.

This is one of the things you hate the most about me.

This is one of the million things I hate Yeah.

Ten Things I hate about you. Great movie. Great movie. Is I lose track of my phone a lot.

Great point.

Okay. A lot. And that's in my small apartment, I would lose track. Now, the house has proven to be trickier with where I leave my phone.

You just got an iPad you keep by your bedside table that you can turn it off for them.

She'll figure out how to lose that, too. Because this is the solution I'm I'm always suggesting, Rob, is you have designated places you set the thing down. I know, but- But you're not going to do that. I've accepted that.

I know. It's been years. You've had to accept it. I remember one of our first fights about that.

You do? Yeah. How did it go?

We were in your old house in the living room, and I couldn't find my phone.

Misplaced your phone.

Yeah. You suggested having spot, having designated spots. Your motto, Designated Spots.

That'll be on my tombstone. Use a Designated Spots.

And Kristen was there, too. And she was like, Well, not everyone. She was really trying to bridge the gap. Defend you, probably. Defend me.

Because She, too, needs to use it as designated. It was really two against one.

Yeah, but I think she uses designated spots more than me because she's been living with you for a long time.

Yeah. No one has adopted designated spots except for me.

Yeah. One time we found her phone, it was so wild. In a box, we were returning something, and it was in the box. Thank God we found it.

That almost got returned? Yeah. Oh, my Lord. Yeah, that's not a designated spot.

That's an interesting designated spot.

No, it's antithetical to the point of a designated spot. If the designated spot is about to travel via the US Postal Service, I want you to have a tether, actually, like a 40-foot, coily, just the thin thing that they put little kids on, leashes at the mall, but even thinner. Okay. And that's anchored to your night stand. And you can travel around your house and use your phone, and you're just dragging this everywhere.

Oh, that sounds horrible.

Yeah, that's another great solution.

Just so you know, my I think this is way too cute for that, for a little string all over the place.

But maybe after two weeks of it and hating the eyesore of it, you'll be like, Fuck, I'll do designated spots.

Yeah, maybe. You're right. I'll keep you guys updated.

This episode was brought to you by Designated spots.

If I get a dog, then I'll train that dog to do it.

To use a phone? No, get a second phone that goes around the dog's collar. Oh. Or maybe get an Apple Watch that goes on its collar, and the only app on it is find my phone.

And you're like, Come here, Mitzie. No, my dog is going to be really smart. You're going to lose the fucking dog.

You're going to lose the fucking dog.

Ross? Yeah, because Monica and Ross. I already named him. Okay. And I'm just going to have him smell the phone a lot. So he just knows where the phone is at all times.

You'll reward him with treats every time he gets the phone. But he's going to bite the screen.

But he has a soft touch. Okay. My dog does. Anywho, yes, I've been there for about less than a week.

Five days?

Yeah, five days. Friday to Wednesday. Yeah. At first, Anna came over. She slept over the first two nights.

And how did that go?

That was fun. Was it so fun? That was a sleepover. Yeah, that was really fun. Did you guys drink wine?

Yeah, of course. Have you convinced her to get into hairplay yet?

No, she's not a hairplay person.

So you had the two sleepovers, and then she left. And then your first night on your own, were you scared or do you feel great?

I was a little scared, but not nearly as scared as I thought. What's it like to wake up and go downstairs and have breakfast or make your tea? It's so weird. So far, it just feels like I'm in somebody else's really nice house. It has not sunk in that all these things things are mine that I can poop on the floor if I want. Sure.

There's no law against it.

I told you this. The first night, I was by myself. I went to the bathroom in the middle of the night, and I had to walk. First pee of the day. I had I walked far to get there. I was like, Oh, wow. I feel pretty confident, and I know my value for the most part in the world-ish. I don't have a a lot of imposter syndrome is what I'm trying to say. In your general life. In my general life. When I was peeing in the night, I was just like, Oh, wow. I do I deserve this. I was very much like the other, something bad is going to happen. You're not allowed to have this. Yeah. Why? This isn't for me. I don't deserve it. And that was weird. I never feel like that. I buy shit all the time. Nice stuff. But I think the apartment, weirdly, now I can see in retrospect, all these apartments that are very reasonably priced.

Modest. You've been living in a modest apartment.

The irony, though, in the stupidity of all this is I've been paying a mortgage. I just haven't been seeing it or paying attention to it. That's true. And I've been paying rent.

So I've actually been spending more money than I am right now.

Yeah, that's true. It's just weird to be in there and feel... Yeah, it's just a weird mental game.

It's hard to accept.

It's hard to wrap your head around.

And then, yeah, you're like, Well, someone's going to come take it clearly.

Oh, I mean, the amount of times I've thought about the LA fire since I moved it, I think about it every 14 minutes. I'm just like, Oh, my God. It's going to burn Yeah. I spent six years. This could burn down any minute.

In six minutes. I think it's worth sharing because it's all so much trickier than you're guessing it's going to be, which is not to say it's not fantastic. Oh, my God. It's so fucking lucky, but also- So lucky. There's just a lot of mental- They're tied together.

The feelings of gratitude and the feelings of- Unworthiness? Yeah, are all the same. You don't really feel like you're unworthy of bad things. It's the good things that you're like, Oh, my God, I don't deserve this. But also because I was talking to Anthony last night, and I was like, What's funny, though, because I was like, Oh, my God, how much do I talk about the house? Is that going to sound so braggy? But what is also funny and something I don't think about a lot is, of course, not everyone, but a lot of the people listening have houses.

Oh, yeah.

It's a city like LA, New York, San Francisco. It's very specific cities where you can't afford a house at all.

Yeah. Home ownership is limited to a very few.

Here. But that's rare.

Yeah, percentage-wise of the population. In Michigan, most of my friends own house.

Yeah. I think most people listening who aren't in those parts of the country, probably a lot of them have houses. This is like that. It's just new to me.

I had it with the first house I got. I remember Bre and I sleeping on the floor in front of the fireplace because the heat wasn't on yet. I'm just both going like, Well, this is what you get when you're 50.

Yeah, that's so interesting. I don't have that age thing. I think maybe because all my friends growing up, they all have houses.

Well, it's specifically a nice house. The majority of the houses in Milford in 1980, they were lower income, small little houses. So for people who got that like, 3,000 square foot house on an acre, that was always a dude in his peak earning, 55. He had been at the company for 35 years.

My parents have a... Oh, I should say I'm on meth right now.

Okay. On D?

Yeah, I'm on D. Nice. It's a good ride. I have a cold, and it's fine because I'm on meth. Remember when you took a drug test and it showed up a little bit of a meth because you were on D?

Yes. Right after all the chaos. Yeah. And I'm like, I am not on meth, you guys. I just ate. You'll never see me eat on meth. Also, I slept last night.

Yeah.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, If You Dare.

So my parents, they have this It's shocking, this big superstition. Okay. That when you move in, and they've been talking about this for years. When you move in, there's a ritual that I have to do where I pour milk in a pot and you boil it until it boils over.

It's got to come out the sides? Yeah. I mean, how did these things start?

It's like your cup runneth over. It's a way to start. You're bringing in abundance. I I was like, Oh, boy. Okay.

But you have a nice new range. You don't want to get hot milk all over everything.

I know. I was like, I'm going to have this boiled milk everywhere. It smelt like cheese in your- Yeah. But it's so important to them. They brought it up so many times. Then on Friday, they were like, Don't forget the milk.

When do you have to do it? Night one, I imagine.

I got nervous about that. It was getting in my head because I was like, I don't have a small enough pot right now to do it. And so I was like, Can I do it tomorrow? My mom was like, I could tell she didn't like that, but what could she do? So I did do it.

Good. I mean, my point to her would have been like, If you're going to do it, do it right. Do it right now.

No, I didn't do it that day.

Oh, Jesus, Magga, now I'm superstitious.

No, I didn't have the pot.

You should have... Your neighbor's had pots.

I know, but it needed to be really small because then I'm pouring so much milk.

Well, you wanted to run it over, flood your kitchen with hot milk.

That's the goal. I didn't want to put two gallons of milk in there and waste it. So I ordered from a conglomerate. Something I'm trying to do less, I did do because 24 hours shipping. I ordered this very small pot. Okay.

It feels like a little bit of a workaround, but continue. Why? Because if your cup runneth over, the whole point is abundance. Yeah. And you're going to heat up a thimble with a drop of milk in it.

No, it's the spilling over. It's not the amount of milk. It's just that it boils to the top and spills over. Okay?

God, I wish they could explain to me.

It makes sense to me, actually, logically. It does. Yeah, you know the idiom your cup runneth over?

I do, but that's when you fill a cup. You have so much bounty that the cup filled and you overfilled it because there's excess. Putting some marginal amount of milk in a pan and then making it boil over is very interesting, and I'd like to know a little more about the the logic behind it.

Okay. In my head, maybe it's like you work for it. You work You work hard and then your cup run it over.

But they might tell me this, which would be satisfying.

Yeah.

Generally, when people boiled milk and rice, there wasn't ever enough that it would have come out the pot. But occasionally, you had so much that you were making such a big batch that would happen. I'd be like, Oh, great. There has to be something behind it.

Might be fun if I call my mom. Okay, call her.

Yeah, because she's not going to know. That's what Are you fun about it? I know. She won't know. We'll see if it lines up with what we're at.

I wonder if my dad's there, too.

No, he's at work because he's retired.

We're Monica. Hi, mom. You're on the fact check, okay? Hi, Nerme. Hey. Mom, we have a question about the milk superstition. Is there a backstory to it?

I need a little bit more of the origin, what it symbolizes, what happened historically.

I don't really know. Yeah, that's what we thought. We've just always done it. I think it has to do with some Hindu tradition. It's some spiritual meaning. I don't really know exactly. Okay. Honestly, I don't know. That's what we thought. We'll look it up, but I didn't know if you happened to know. We figured you probably didn't know.

Monica was free form guessing, and I wasn't sure that it was the right thing.

I mean, I figured it's like your cup- It has to be milk. I don't know the thing about spilling over. I don't understand. I think that's like your cup runneth over.

I think you're conflating different- Yeah, maybe that's what it is.

My mom said that's right.

Well, of course it makes sense to her. You guys are the same.

It makes sense. Yeah, it makes sense to me, too.

It makes logical sense.

All right. Well, we're going to look it up then. Okay. Okay. Bye. I love you. I love you.

The overflowing milk represents an abundance of food, love, and warmth in the new home. It's often believed to purify the space and usher in positive energy. I love it. It's milk because that's often offered to deities or shared with family members, and it should ideally overflow towards the north or east directions.

They didn't tell me that. You're going to have to put your whole oven on a slant. You're going to put a chim under there.

I didn't know that. I don't know which way. I'm not going to think about which way it went.

Okay, so you did do it. You got your little pot.

I did do it. I got my pot. I boiled the milk. I sent a video to them. Okay, good. So then it was like that. I did it the first day. I was by myself So that feels like that. The other days were fakes because they were sleepovers.

I'm just grateful it didn't get away from you. And you're sending them a video of you with bad milk burns.

I know. Oh, yeah. She told me I could put aluminum foil. Under the- Yeah. So I did that.

Okay, great. That's what the Hindus did. They put aluminum foil under their burner. Yeah, they did.

They did because they also respect cleanliness. Anyway, so that was a big superstition. Checked off the list, thank God.

Yeah.

Literally, thank God. Thanks to the gods.

Thanks to the gods, the many gods.

And that is true in the times that... Also, my dad went to the temple that day. I think he felt like he had to go to protect my house, because also because I wasn't doing the milk in time.

That might be where he puts more coins in the sin, by the way.

Yeah, he checks in there. The temple. Yeah, he goes to the quote temple. But you do give off, you give fruit, you give offerings to the gods.

Yeah, as you should. Yeah. You got to appease them.

You got to say thank you. Yeah.

Well, I did so much.

It did feel like you were gone a really long time.

For me, I've never had this. I've had a week that felt like two weeks.

Sure.

This week felt like three weeks.

I thought you were going to say three months or something.

No, that'd be nuts. This literally, if you had to ask me, as I got to the airport, When did you fly here? What it really felt like was three weeks. Now, I've had it where it felt like two weeks. But this really, I'm like, I know I've been gone for three weeks. I know why, which was I left at the crack gas of dawn on a Wednesday. I flew to Miami, and I had been told by production, if I wanted to check a bag, I could not take the connecting flight to Key West, that that bag would not get there. So I heated them. I'm like, Well, I got to bring a bag. It's a week. And so I rented a car. So I flew to Miami. Then I rented a car. Then I drove at rush hour to Key West.

Okay. Because that's where you were shooting.

That's where I was going to shoot. Yeah. Well, flag on the play. Interesting turn of events. So I'm driving there. That says it's going to be four hours. I'm three and a half hours into the trip, and then I get text that says, your pickup is at 5: 00 AM. I'm like, Jesus Christ, 05: 00 AM, because I'm on LA time. That's 2: 00 AM for me. Yeah. And you know my pledge on this, my pledge for this journey acting again is like, I am not going to question anything. Yeah, which I respect. I'm just not... But then they say, Luckily, the pickup is so early because we're shooting on Marathon, which is a different key, which I just drove through 20 minutes before. So I flipped a bitch. I headed up to Marathon, got my own hotel, and I fucking got to wake up. I got to go in at 7: 00 instead of 5: 00.

Oh, that worked out.

And then I shot from 07: 00 AM till noon, and then I drove back to Miami. Oh. Right when I got off work.

Okay. So again, this is- To go to a Getty?

To go hang with Aaron.

Why was Aaron there? He just to meet you for fun.

I had three days off. I shot on a Thursday, and then I was shooting again on Monday. Got it. And again, it's an entire day to get back to LA. So if I wanted to go back to LA, I would have gone an entire day to get there, and then I would have been there for one day, and then I would have gone an entire day.

Wouldn't made sense.

Right. I did feel like, I think my family member is like, Well, you're going to have three days off and not come home. But I was like, well, two of those would be traveling, whatever. So I leave at noon.

Hear some guilt.

Yeah. I was just like, Chris and I probably would have flown home in that little Yeah.

Well, she, yes, notoriously, she'll do anything to be home. Yeah.

Erin gets there. First night, we go out and we get this outrageous dinner.

Oh.

Beautiful dinner. This restaurant had a pig we could have ordered. We would have to order in an hour and a half ahead of time. It's a whole pig for the table, and it serves six to eight people. Oh, my God. And we were like, should we come back and try to take that pig down?

And is the head on it?

I hope not, but probably they like to leave the head on it. I know. I don't need that part. No. They like to put an apple on it to dress it up. Why do they do that? Maybe to dress it up. No. Or maybe their teeth look so gross. They're like, shove something in there. I don't know what's going on with it.

Or is it seasoned?

Well, you're not eating the face. But maybe it sinks into the body.

Okay, I don't want to talk about that.

Anyways, let's not get bogged on. Next, we didn't even get it. Now, we know the only reason we can really justify, we got to shoot some Ted Seeger's content. We can't be together. Smart. So I book an airboat tour through the Everglades. Okay. I get this idea when I'm flying in because you're flying in over the Everglades. And I just start hearing the Jerry Reid song, Here comes Amos. Oh, Amos Moses was a cage hand.

We just talked about that recently.

We don't need to do that again. He lived by himself in the swamp. Honed an elevator for living. I'll just knock him in the head with the stomp. Some Louisiana all going to get you, Amos. So I hear that song.

This is the grocery song.

Yeah. Horse Razz. Yeah. Which is all about a guy who haunt the Alligators. So I'm like, Oh, I want to do a Ted Seeger's Amos. Here comes Amos commercial. Okay. So on the drive out to this airboat tour, we're like, okay, in order of what we hope can happen, hopefully we see some alligators and we can get the beer can next close to it. Oh, okay. And then we go, I wonder if there's any way this guy will let us drive the airboat.

Oh, God.

While drinking some Seagr.

Of course he let you.

Well, hold on.

Okay.

We're like, that's the pie in the sky fantasy, right? So we meet the dude at the gas station. We follow him to this little fucking pallet that's sitting on the shoreline, and there's the big fan boat. It's got the huge propeller in back, and then this big 454 big block motor in it. And the dude's awesome right away. He says pretty quickly, You're in recovery, right? And he's from there. He was Nicaraguan. Oh, cool. But grew up in Miami. And he said, You're in recovery. And I said, oh, yeah, we both are. In fact, we're on to shoot a bunch of stuff for this NABR. And he's like, oh, yeah, man, I'm in recovery, too. I was like, oh, fuck, yeah. So this dude had been sober for, I think, two or three years. Good for him. We're whipping through the fucking Everglades. The amount of birds overhead, it's so otherworldly. I'm shooting all this great stuff. We get up, we're one inch from a crocodile. We're already, as you can imagine, we're tickled pink. We are drinking beer next to the alligator. And then I say to the guy, I go, Listen, tell me to fuck off, but is there any chance if we get in a straight away, that we could sit in the chair and act like we're driving.

He's like, Yeah, let's go. Okay, now go ahead and look at the other videos. Because we had to learn to drive.

Oh, wow. Oh, my God. Look at Aaron. That's how you drive it?

Yes. So you have this stick in your left hand that controls the fins behind the fan. Wow. So you're just directing the air left or right. And then there's a gas pedal. It was easy to drive once you got the hang of the stick because you're not turning left or right. You're going backward or forward to go left or right.

Interesting. Okay, I'm going to, Aaron. That's already epic. There you go. Oh, man. That's all right.

It's all right.

You guys are such boys. It is so funny. I mean this as a compliment. This looks so boring. This looks so boring. Not the video, but just to be excited about driving. I can't relate at all.

But when you look at that thing, aren't you like, How on earth do you drive that thing? No.

See, that's the difference. I'm really not at all interested.

Oh, yeah. I think for me, I know for Aaron, I'm not going to speak for Robin, he never agrees with me. You look at that thing, you're like, How are they driving that? Where's the steering wheel? So then there's a little bit of like, Could I drive it if I had to? Sure.

I know. See, that's the difference.

I get that. You get it, right? Yeah, I get that. What if we were flying an airplane? The guy was like, Yeah, I'll go give it a shot. And then Aaron and I flew an airplane and landed. When you just be like, Oh, my God, I can't believe you did that. So it's a lot Oh, my God, I can't believe we did that. We got to fly.

No, but I guess what I'm saying is I don't ever go into an airplane and think like, I wonder how I fly this. That doesn't go in. I'm just like, How do I escape if something bad is happening? That's the thing that happens to me.

Yes, and I have an immediate challenge in front of me. We were saying, would we try to drive a cruise ship?

Is there a video of the boat not from inside died?

No, because we would be standing in the everglitz.

I know, but I didn't know if you got any. Oh, right.

I have video of another fan boat that went by because you're curious what it looks like.

Yeah. It's like because you're just seeing you guys in a chair.

Yeah, with an enormous propeller behind us.

Propeller, but you can't see the extent.

You don't even know what an airboat/fan boat is, right? No. Yeah, it's like all the swamp boats. They're crazy. They don't have a propeller or anything. You're just right there.

Okay, yeah. Look at that contraption. Yeah, that is wild.

And you're driving it by steering the wind coming off that huge fan.

That's cool.

Yeah.

Ish. You can drive it over land. That's what's cool about it. You can go over grass, land. You can get yourself in and out of everywhere with those things. Okay. Anywho, we were ecstatic.

That's fun. I'm glad you guys did that. Speaking of driving, I forgot to say this earlier when you were talking about the driving portion. Yeah. I got pulled over.

For a speaking?

No. And it was by Chips.

California Highway Patrol.

Yeah. Your bread and butter. Yeah.

Did you tell them you were in Chips?

No, but I would have. You should have. If things had gotten to that point. I'm progressively bad, then I would have said it. Okay, the house is very close to my apartment, obviously. I lived five minutes away. But because of the way the highways are, now I'm using different highways.

Yeah, you used to take the five a lot. Always. Yeah, I'm never on the five.

I know. I was using a different highway to get to a place that I go a lot. All of a sudden, my GPS told me to take the exit, but Right before that was a bus or something lane. I don't know what it was, but I took that. Then there was a chips, and they pulled me over. I was like, Was Was I not supposed to do that? I was like, Was I not supposed to do that? And she said, No, that's a something lane. There's a little sign. I was like, Well, I don't have good eyes. I didn't say that. Yes, smart.

I can't see. That's their fault.

That makes sense. I just said, I don't know how to see. Yeah, but I got away with it, thank God. Got a warning. Yeah, but I was really scared. She was like, Do you live around here? I was just trying to answer so honest. I was like, No, I do. And she looked at me weird like, Well, why wouldn't you know this? And I didn't want to explain, Well, I just moved, and I normally use the other highway. Right.

I'm only good at one highway.

So I just was like, I'm really sorry. And she let me off with a warning.

Good, good, good, good, good.

So that was scary. I hate getting... I don't like getting pulled. You get pulled over a lot, so you- I haven't pulled over in a while.

Let's knock on one of them. That's about the first time I've ever wanted to knock on one. Oh, wow. Okay, so that was that. Then we went out, the restaurant, Monica, half of it's underwater. Oh, wow. It's all this water. And there are performers, contortionists, people hanging from the ceiling by their hair doing acrobatics.

I love acrobatics.

Everyone's dressed. It's like what Marcella was talking about. It's just like the vibe, the way the men are dressed.

Yeah, it's so upscale.

It's so cool. And But there's upscale that's like, fucking there's no rhythm to it. You can go upscale Connecticut, upscale New York. No, no, no.

This is vibrant.

I can't tell you how happy we were. Oh, so grateful. Yeah. And then the next day, I drove four hours back to Key West. Shot all day Monday. Had a great shoot day. Like, really so happy I ended up doing this whole thing. This was my last day on the show.

Oh, it was? Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize that.

Anyways, by the time I landed last night at 10: 00 at night, I was like, I've been home for three weeks. I had four different life experiences.

You did a lot. Oh, spilled.

Good fortune. And your cop running over and it happened naturally.

Oh, wow. We'll leave it there for some good luck. Yeah.

That's north, too. What? That's north, too.

Oh, really good. And east. It's northeast.

Oh, my God.

Oh, my God.

It was really meant to be.

You did that on purpose. I didn't. And it is milk, right? What is it?

There is milk in it. It's tea with milk in it. This feels so staged. Wow. My dad. My dad did that. That's a nice framing. It's like when you spill, it's like, it's good luck.

It's very good framing.

Charlie? Yeah, we should get into Charlie because Charlie has a lot of facts, weirdly. Okay, Charlie Facts. Now, first off, first and foremost, he performed at the Super Bowl, as he told us he was going to do. He was incredible.

Yes. It seemed like he did exactly what he was aiming to do.

He said, We can look back and see. I think he did it.

He's like, Then the thing will come in here, and then the horns.

Yeah, he said a choir. I think that was there. Multiple people, musicians, were like, That's the best. I think that's the best you can do. Oh, good. Yeah, it was really good. I've sing at sporting events. Oh, you have? I've sing the national anthem twice at sporting events.

By yourself?

No, in my chorus.

Okay. I was going to say- Still counts? Yeah.

It still counts.

But I couldn't see you standing up by yourself and sing in the National idea because you won't sing in here. No, I won't. So it seemed really out of keeping with what I know That's right.

I was in a chorus, and I think sometimes I would just mouth it. Sure. That's always too scared. It's a good technique. Now, what song were you referencing that was ripped off Marvin Gay song? Robin Thicke and Pharrelle. Got to give it up. Oh, I'm sorry. Marvin Gay song has Got to give it up. Blurred Lines is the song. The Gay Estate was awarded $7. 3 million after successfully arguing that the song's groove and feel were lifted despite arguments that the sheet music was different. Now, this is a tricky... I think this is tricky because can't they just say they were sampling it?

Yeah, that's what's interesting. I think there's a lot of rules. There's something about you can do two or three bars, but not four. I think in sampling, that's what they're working around.

I think you have to pay for sampling, too. Oh, you do.

You pay for sampling? Yeah. Okay.

Well, I won't out this person, but there was an album out recently that had so many, what I thought was samples, but I don't think they were samples, but they were the same music as other music. So I think this is, yeah, this is tricks.

Yeah. And also, when you start learning to play guitar, when you learn these three cords on guitar, you can play 80% of the rock music that's ever... It's just like the tempo is a little different, the pace is a little different, but it's really just going back and forth between these three cords. Yeah, it's hard.

It's hard. I'm sure it has to be very obvious.

Well, Blord Lines is that song. If you listen to them back to back. There's really no... And I worship Pharrell.

Me too.

So no shade to him.

And we had Robin Thicke on the pod.

Yes.

In that same vein, when Charlie was here and was doing his amazing thing he do with his voice and with all the songs, and he can just sing them all. But he can sing the sound. It's so wild. He was doing that, and we were like, Oh, Studio sounds like Prince, sounds like 1989. We were talking about that. Prince was first. We weren't sure, but it was 1984. And then Phil Collins was 1985. So very quickly. And then Purple Rain is 8 minutes and 41 seconds. There's a shorter seven-inch. You know what that means?

No. That's a 45. So your 33s are 12 inches wide and your 45s are seven inches. So seven-inch or twelve-inch.

Oh, okay. Yeah. A shorter seven-inch edit often used for radio is four minutes and five seconds.

I think that's what we all grew up listening to.

Okay. And then live, the song frequently exceeded twelve minutes, with some performances lasting over 19 minutes.

That's a long time for a song.

That's cool to see in person.

Might be too long for me. Really? I start getting like, When will this end?

Oh, my God. Limited edition, though.

I guess that's a good framing of it.

I'm all about framing today. He asked, Is Bowie Sushi still a thing in Malibu? I looked it up. It is. It was open yesterday. Oh, okay. It's spelled B-U-I, okay? Oh, the name of the host of the New Jersey radio show 101. 1 WCBS FM in the '90s. The morning hosts were Ron Lundee and Harry Harrison. Harry Harrison. Do you think that was his real name? Probably not.

I don't know. It sounds a little bit like Dallas Reigns.

It does.

Also, Harry and the Henderson's.

Maybe it was a nod. Yeah.

Maybe he's a sasquatch.

What's that mean? Why?

Harry was a sasquatch in Harry and the Henderson's.

Oh, I never saw it.

They hit a Sasquatch.

They bring him home. They hit him with a car?

I believe that's how they came. Yeah, I think that's how he came to live in the house.

They hit him with a car and then they kidnapped him?

No, they wanted to resuscitate him and bring him back to the house and help him. And they became friends. Oh. You know, it's a very uplifting... It's not a horror movie. It's a positive kids' movie where they befriend a Bigfoot.

I thought it was maybe a show. It might be a show. Oh, okay.

It's a film. It's a what?

It's a film.

Oh, it's a film. It's neither a movie or a show. Okay, so you just blew your nose. I cut it, but you blew your nose. Yeah. And since I've had a little cold today, earlier before my D kicked in, I was sneezing and blowing my nose so much. I thought of you so much because I was like, this is one, so annoying. Isn't it the worst? Two, embarrassing. Yeah. Dax is all the time.

And Aaron does it even worse. Oh, my God. And Aaron has been doing it since I met him. He's never had relief from this. I have periods of relief, but in general, yeah, I hate it.

I never have to blow my nose unless I've showered or something, so water's in there, or I'm sneezzing. You have to blow your nose all the time.

Yeah, all the time.

Okay. Now, Rumson, the town he's from, he said it's 7,000 people. He was right, about 7,200 to 7,300 residents. You really nailed that. He really did nail it. Is Vin Diesel from New Jersey? No, he's not. Where is he from? He's from Alameda County, California, but then later moved to New York with his fraternal twin brother, Paul. Oh. Yeah. Oh, my God. His mom was an astrologer. We should have him on. His life sounds interesting. Now, the Japanese word that's not wabisabi, Jesus. We brought it up again in an episode I'm editing currently.

And it's in a TV show I just watched.

Wabisabi or this other one?

The broken pots.

Yeah. Okay. Kinsukori or kintsugi.

Kintsugi is the thing I think of a lot. Kintsugi.

Translates to golden joinery.

That's the thing I left out. Aaron and I watch the Smashing Machine. We're also watching movies every night. And that's a big part of the Smashing Machine. Oh, it is? Yeah.

Okay. Well, ding, ding, ding. He brought up smosh. That's similar to the word smash. And Smosh is... Because we even was talking about his YouTube stuff. Smosh was big in that world. American YouTube sketch, Comedy, Improf Collective. I worked for Smosh. You did? Yeah. When I had all those millions of jobs, one of them was for Smosh. Someone I did improv with worked for Smosh, and I needed a job. And so he got So I wrote little articles for Smosh for a long time. Oh, you did? Yeah. Like 10 Funiest Moments from Spongebob, 10 like those types of things. Okay.

Yeah.

I did that for a while, and I forgot all about it. Oh. Former employer. Okay. Is Bruce Springsteen from Ansbury Park? So born in Long Branch and raised in Freehold. Oh, Asbury. Asbury Park. Okay. Yeah. Asbury. Asbury's. No, As. Asbury. Yeah. There's not two S's. Okay. But there's also no Z, so it's hard.

Yeah.

So, yeah. He is? I mean, okay. It says that he was born in Long Branch and raised in Freehold, so that's not saying anything about it. But then it also says that- He was born and raised in Asbury? Specifically, Springsteen is Asbury Park, New Jersey, so it must be in Freehold or something. Sure.

That makes sense.

Okay. So I only have one more fact, which is I wanted to go through some classic vocab words because we talked about some vocab words. Okay. I have a list. A thousand most common SAT words.

A thousand?

Yeah. Let's see how fast I can do it. I'm just kidding. I won't do that. But do you want to pick a letter, and I'll pick a couple?

Sure. J. Okay. Rare letter to start a word with.

J is really small. It only has three.

Wow. I had a hunch.

Wow. Okay. Do you want to guess?

Juxtaposition.

Yes, that's one. Oh, my God. If you get these.

J Prudence.

No, but in that vein, in that category.

Judicial?

Yes, but it's a version of that word.

Adjudicate? No, that's adding one. All right, what is it?

Judicious.

Judicious. Yeah. Wow. Okay. I'm going to say we're 1. 5 for two.

No, I'm going to give 1. 8.

Okay. Wow. That's generous. 1. 8.

And then the last one- I'll never get. No, you'll get. Shall Can I give you a hint?

Yeah, give me some a hint.

It's a state of being, a positive state of being.

Jubulent? Yes. Really good job.

I was very impressed. That was so fun.

It's Jubulent?

Yeah, Jubulent. Jubulent.

Is how I say it. Yeah, I don't say it right.

Wow, that was really good. Fun. I'm impressed.

Oh, thank you. I love when I impress you.

And that's it for Charlie.

Juxtaposition, judicious, and jubulent.

That's right. Really good. Really good. Okay, well, that's it for Charlie. I thought that was a lovely episode, I put him in the category of people like I put Charlie Sheen in, where I had a really strong idea of what they were going to be, and then they were very much not that.

Yeah, I wasn't saddled with any I have an expectation of him. I'm in the dark a lot about... I don't know about the Taylor Swift song about him and stuff. I'm a dumb dumb.

He's a genius. He's a musical genius. Really wild. I didn't know that. Yeah..

All right. Love you. Love you.