Charlie Puth’s Most Underrated Song

Time to read: 6 minutes

Let’s talk about Charlie Puth’s best and most underrated song ‘BOY’, taken from 2018’s ‘Voicenotes‘.

When Charlie Puth first came on the scene, I was pretty unenthused. The likes of ‘Marvin Gaye‘ and ‘One Call Away‘, whilst both undeniably catchy Pop songs, grated on me and I dismissed him as annoying, immature and generic Pop.

Fast forward a year or two later and everything began to change. Lead single ‘Attention‘ from 2018’s Voicenotes was a funky, slickly-produced piece of Pop which didn’t alienate Puth’s fan base from his earlier material but also felt like a huge step up and introduced him to a new legion of fans. It set the tone for ‘Voicenotes‘, utilising an infectious bassline, slick beats, rich harmonies and borrowing elements from 1980’s soft-soul and funk. It felt far more mature, polished and credible than the likes of ‘Marvin Gaye‘ and was well received by critics.

Follow up single ‘How Long‘ was another step up, again utilising pop-funk sensibilities, driven by a prominent bass line, bubbly synths and punchy, punctuated lyrics. By the time ‘Voicenotes‘ was released, my thoughts on Charlie had completely changed. I was beginning to respect him as a writer, musician and producer as opposed to dismissing him as a generic pop star.

And he is far more than just your average popstar. Puth studied music extensively as a child, learning piano from age 4, attending Manhattan School of Music Pre-College as a jazz piano major and later graduating from Berklee College of Music, where he majored in music production and songwriting. He has perfect pitch which hugely influences his vocal delivery and, understandably, makes many who aren’t aware of this fact dismiss his vocals as heavily auto-tuned. Whilst pitch-correction is undeniably a part of the production of his songs, Puth also has an incredible ear for melody and harmony.

Even Taylor Swift mentions Puth on the title track to her latest album ‘The Tortured Poets Department‘:
You smokеd, then ate seven bars of chocolate
We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.

‘Voicenotes‘ built upon Puth’s already catchy Pop music and injected more funk and jazz, two elements which are a pivotal part of his musicality and were missing from his debut album. He described ‘Voicenotes‘ as “like walking down a dirt road and listening to New Edition in 1989 – and being heartbroken, of course“, which sums up the album perfectly. He even managed to gather an eclectic, yet wonderful assortment of features on the record, collaborating with the likes of Kehlani, Boyz II Men and, wonderfully, James Taylor.

‘BOY’ is Track 8 on Voicenotes and, like many tracks on the album is co-written by Charlie along with Pop hitmaker Jacob Kasher. Even from the song’s simple, yet capitalised title, it garners immediate attention. Lyrically mirroring the plot to ‘The Graduate’, ‘BOY’ documents Puth’s frustration with pursuing an older woman who won’t take him seriously due to the age difference. It’s a Pop song with glorious hints of Amercian late 1980’s R&B.

On the song’s creation, Puth said:

I started with 12 chords. And I accidentally—when I make music in Pro Tools, I accidentally highlighted all of those chords that I had recorded and dragged them over to the right by one eighth note. I just accidentally dragged them over to the right. And I already had an eighth-note hi-hat track, and it just opened up the song so much more, just from that one rhythmic mistake. I didn’t have the vocal, I didn’t have the verse melody, the pre-chorus melody, or anything. But it gave it such an interesting rhythmic pocket, when I dragged over these prerecorded synths, and it just opened up the song even more. And it’s a complex rhythm, but it’s just so much fun. It’s addictive to listen to. You can just listen to it on a loop, and it feels like it’s never-ending.

–via Glamour Magazine

Puth’s smooth, tenor vocals really shine on the track, regularly breaking into seemingly-impossible stunning falsettos. This is particularly the case during the song’s pre-chorus, during which Puth’s ascending melody line playfully interacts with and mirrors the synth accompaniment perfectly before the song gives way to its first chorus, utilising a funky, prominent bass line, the repeated opening chords and Charlie’s frustrated lyrics.

Whilst the lyrics express exasparation, there are lighter moments, such as the witty juxtoposition of the sung lyrics with the spoken, backing vocal replies: ‘why?’, ‘oh.’:

You told me you needed a perfect guy
That’ll make your parents proud
Guess you still ain’t found him yet (Why?)
‘Cause we’re still messin’ around (Oh)

But the song takes another massive step up from around the halfway mark with an impromptu, yet incredible jazz keyboard solo over glorious, Boyz II Men inspired harmony backing vocals before launching back into the chorus with Charlie’s ad-libs gliding effortlessly over the now augmented, richer production. The song’s instrumentation is really given centre stage in this final part of the song, with added synthpads and quite possibly my favourite outro to a Pop song EVER, where Puth lets the song breathe, letting twinkling synths, warm pads, the song’s stomping percussion and funky bass line do the talking, only occasionally singing the refrain ‘just like a boy’ over the top. It’s so good that it makes you want to immediately replay the track and get another fix.

Puth himself still talks fondly about the song, still performing it live despite it never being released as an official single and mentioning in an interview many years later:

It wasn’t a hit record, it was just on my last album, it was called “Boy” and it was the first time in my career that the LGBTQ community and the music-head community joined forces. And I was getting kids from Berkeley and those who do drag making video responses on YouTube saying, “I didn’t really like this kid before, but I liked this song.” I didn’t even know that was possible, that the two communities could converge like that. But of course it’s possible, and it inspired me to make more music like that. That’s what the next album is. It’s music I can look at myself in the mirror and listen to, and hopefully others can celebrate their bodies by looking into the mirror.

–via Interview Magazine (June 13, 2023)

You can listen to ‘BOY’ below: