Senior Reporter, HuffPost
Charlie Puth says he was in disbelief after hearing Taylor Swift name-check him in a new song.
The “We Don’t Talk Anymore” singer opened up about the surreal experience in a Rolling Stone interview published online Friday, and said he was having lunch when a friend called to tell him about the mention.
Puth said that his “brain immediately went to ‘Oh, like in an interview or something. That’s cool. I love Taylor Swift.’”
The friend had heard a leaked version of Swift’s latest album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” in which she sings on its namesake song: “You smokеd, then ate seven bars of chocolate. We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.”
Puth initially thought the song and name-drop might’ve been generated by artificial intelligence, and expressed doubts about the legitimacy of the mention.
“I’m going to wake up tomorrow and it was just a big joke that someone was playing on me because someone thinks I shouldn’t be a bigger artist, so get the biggest artist since the Beatles to say that I should be a bigger artist. Ha ha ha,” he said.
But when the album came out and Puth heard that the mention was real, he said he “just cried, dude.”
“My first thought was like, ‘Wow. She said my name,’” the entertainer recalled.
“I was in complete denial, too, because there was no way this could be a thing. It’s so random,” he said. “But then again, I’m listening to the song and I’m like, ‘It’s not random. It’s probably about a real conversation she had with somebody.’”
The mention from Swift inspired confidence in Puth, who wrote the “Shake It Off” singer a note in response.
“I was just like, ‘This means more, and I will take this newfound courage to put this new body of work out,’” he said. “Again, I was working on it already, but I was just unsure and it’s cool to get a stamp of approval from an artist that you have idolized for such a long time and still do.”
Puth is indeed coming out with new work, and he shouted out Swift in an Instagram post he shared earlier this week about his song “Hero.”
“I want to thank @taylorswift for letting me know musically that I just couldn’t keep this on my hard drive any longer,” he wrote.
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