He soon attended and graduated from the Manhattan School of Music and the Berklee College of Music, and began performing jazz covers on YouTube, where he was discovered by Ellen DeGeneres. Puth, who says he knew he had perfect pitch, was a last-minute fill-in, and before long he was playing regularly at church. He had little interest in music until one Ash Wednesday, when the organist was a no-show. The singer grew up in southern New Jersey’s Monmouth County, raised in a devout Catholic tradition. Puth declined to provide too many details, but said that tragedy also involved a car accident and that he felt his late friend’s presence in the studio that day as he held the belief they could one day communicate again.īy putting an unknown musician at the center of one of the year’s biggest blockbusters, “See You Again” demonstrates what happens when the giant machine of film music meshes with the more democratic Internet, where Puth first made a name for himself. In writing the song, he said he was thinking of a friend who also died abruptly. In part that mix is the result of Puth’s own influence. And we didn’t want the end to be totally sad.” “It had a sense of longing and sadness but it was also uplifting as well. “The first time we heard it we knew this was the end song,” said Moritz. In real life Walker died, but at the end of “Furious 7,” his character, Brian O’Conner, was given a poignant retirement send-off in which he’d be living with his wife and raising a family. “See You Again” also worked for “Furious 7" because of the balanced note the scene struck in the film. “It can be about a death but also someone you miss and can’t wait to see at a barbecue and talk to.” “The chorus felt really big and felt like it was saying something really important for what the moment was going to be,” said Kevin Weaver, president of Atlantic’s film and television group, adding that he thought the song fit a range of moments.
The video, which intercuts the artists with the Walker flashback scenes from the film, has become a viral sensation. 1 on iTunes and is beginning to get airplay on nearly every major pop and R&B station. Though unabashedly sentimental, the song is also highly effective, its power boosted by the offscreen Walker back story it subtextually describes. (Lyrical excerpt: “It’s been a long day without you my friend/ And I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again/ We’ve come a long away from where we began/ Oh, I’ll tell you all about it when I see you again.”)
Puth’s blend of ethereal soul - a kind of more soaring spin on Sam Smith - mixed with his afterlife-tinged lyrics and a high-piano riff have combined to empty out Kleenex boxes in multiplexes across the country.
By the end, Knobloch and his team had a song they liked, and director James Wan and producer Neal Moritz had threaded “See You Again” around and through the poignant final scene. The song then went through an extensive note-giving and production process - there’s a Middle Eastern-flavored sample and other flourishes-and months went by, as beats were added, dropped, and added again, all atop Puth’s simple melody. “It didn’t matter that Charlie was unknown - in fact it helped because it didn’t take you out of the moment,” he said. “It was such an uncommon scene that we needed the song to come before the artist,” Knobloch said, explaining how he and others decided to eschew the time-honored practice of finding a big-name musician for a key soundtrack number even though to do so posed a bigger commercial gamble. The filmmakers, Universal Pictures and the soundtrack label Atlantic Records went gaga for the song, titled “See You Again.” After narrowing it down to a small group of finalists, Atlantic executives and Universal’s music guru, Mike Knobloch, decided to go with “See You Again,” commissioning the rap star and “Fast & Furious 6" contributor Wiz Khalifa to drop verses about family around Puth’s vocals and piano. “And basically 10 minutes later Justin and I wrote it, we sent it off, and I thought we’d never hear about it again.”Īs it turned out, they would. “It just seemed to occur to me from out of nowhere,” Puth said in a phone interview this week.
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