A YouTube kid with perfect hands on a number one hit

Charlie Puth was born in 1991 in Rumson, New Jersey, to a mother who taught music. She introduced him to classical music and began teaching him piano when he was four. At ten he began studying jazz, and from seventh grade through high school he attended the Manhattan School of Music's pre-college programme. He later graduated from Berklee, where he majored in music production and engineering.

Even as a child he was a hustler. In sixth grade he recorded and produced a Christmas album called Have a Very Charlie Christmas and sold it door to door, earning six hundred dollars. At seventeen he started a YouTube channel with comedy videos and acoustic covers, and made theme songs and jingles for other YouTubers. Viral song covers brought him to the label eleveneleven in 2011.

His breakthrough came through the back door. In 2015 he co-wrote, produced and sang on Wiz Khalifa's "See You Again", which sat at the top of the Billboard Hot 100 for twelve non-consecutive weeks and earned him a Golden Globe nomination. That same year his own debut single, "Marvin Gaye", appeared with Meghan Trainor, followed by the album Nine Track Mind and “We Don't Talk Anymore” with Selena Gomez, which reached number nine in the United States.

Later albums, Voicenotes in 2018 and Charlie in 2022, kept him in the top ten, with songs like "Attention" and "Light Switch". Behind the scenes, his writing and production for others has been commercially successful too: in 2021 he co-wrote and produced "Stay" for Justin Bieber and the Kid Laroi, his first non-performing production to top the Hot 100. A fourth album, Whatever's Clever!, arrived in March 2026. His career shows how a producer's ear and a performer's grin can sit in the same person.