Album Review: Whatever’s Clever! by Charlie Puth
Charlie Puth makes his most personal album with BloodPop®, and a guest list spanning three decades. The directness holds.
Michael Tucker, producing as BloodPop®, spent the years before this record in maximalist territory. He was executive producer on Lady Gaga’s Chromatica, co-writer on Justin Bieber’s “Sorry,” Oscar nominee for Gaga’s “Hold My Hand.” His stated aim for Whatever’s Clever! pointed elsewhere. Yamaha CP70 electric piano. Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins as explicit reference points. Production built to push Charlie Puth toward discomfort. Puth had been Berklee-trained, perfect-pitched, capable of walking a million TikTok followers through chord substitutions in real time, and still publicly reduced to the guy who made “Marvin Gaye” long past the point where that reduction made sense. His fourth record is the first one he made with time to figure out what he actually wanted it to be. He told Variety he hadn’t had that kind of breathing room since 2006, and the difference in the material is audible.
Several cuts here are addressed to particular people, and that particularity is what separates the better ones from generic emotional-permission pop. “Cry” quotes Puth’s father: “Whatever hurt you come across/You better get up when you fall down.” The Kenny G saxophone solo on that track was built from a solo Kenny G album cut—Puth and BloodPop® isolated the saxophone track, ran it through Melodyne to sketch the melody they wanted, then sent that demo to Kenny G, who re-recorded it and returned something that beat what they’d drawn. “Hey Brother” roots itself in eighth grade, shared class-cutting, arguments that ended in sucker punches, watching someone come out the other side better every day. On “Until It Happens to You,” Jeff Goldblum doesn’t sing—he talks, straight through, about loss and not missing a second of it, about the horrible things and the mess and knowing a goodbye is eventually coming. Puth’s verse underneath bounces a child on his knee and looks toward fatherhood. His son Jude arrived two weeks before the album dropped.
The next set of the venture covers adjacent territory in self-reckoning, but with enough precision to stay off the confessional-pop shelf. “I Used to Be Cringe” runs through specific evidence—lying about being taller, throwing around the word “baller,” dyeing his hair for reactions, trying so hard it made him cry. These are embarrassing to say out loud, and he says them, which is the point. “Don’t Meet Your Heroes” is murkier, addressed to someone who let him down, but verse two turns and asks whether he hurt that person’s self-esteem, whether he makes it into their memoir. He can’t reduce the other person to a villain because he isn’t sure he wasn’t one. Both people get a line.
Puth wrote “New Jersey” from a place of avoidance, staying off the boardwalk where someone told him she was bored, lying to himself that there’s nothing fun there anyway, finding sand in the hoodie she returned. Then Ravyn Lenae’s verse arrives and reorients the whole track. She knew it was a fling, she’s never been one to wear a ring, and she put the sand in the hoodie on purpose: “I’m sorry if I’m the reason you ended up leaving.” Both come out honest about what they wanted. Those things turned out to be different things. The song holds both without judgment.
Bringing Hikaru Utada onto “Home” and letting her verse stay in Japanese was a more deliberate move than it might register as decoration. She describes building a solo castle without compromise, missing the person who makes the house feel inhabited, asking each day to be able to say tadaima and have someone there. Utada is one of Japan’s best-selling artists; her lines carry the same emotional cargo as Puth’s English ones without English-language mediation between them. “Love in Exile” earns its collaborators differently. Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins wrote “What a Fool Believes” nearly fifty years ago, and McDonald’s verse on this track carries the grain of someone who’s been around long enough to know how these stories close, wondering how what felt like a beginning was already, for the other person, the start of their demise.
Ocean metaphors dominate “Washed Up”—sailing, tides, currents, fog—but none of them narrow down to the concrete detail that makes the family material and the self-examination material press where they do. “Changes” describes drift and distance with enough generality that it could settle over almost any relationship. These aren’t bad tracks; they’re doing less than what surrounds them. Whatever’s Clever! is the record Puth described wanting to make and then made it. The BloodPop® partnership delivered what it promised. Puth sang about subjects he’d avoided, over production he hadn’t attempted before, with guests who showed up and did something with the material. McDonald draws on four decades in this kind of music. Utada brings a second language to the song. What Goldblum offers is closer to a sermon than a verse. The album keeps the company it chose.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Cry,” “New Jersey,” “Love in Exile”