How Charlie Puth transcended the cringe

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On a recent Friday morning, Charlie Puth sat in a green room at Spotify’s Los Angeles headquarters, sipping a can of La Croix as he pondered which was more likely to drop first: his new record or his first child.“It’s quite possible it could be the same week,” he said.Turns out the kid beat the music.Puth announced on social media Monday that his wife, Brooke Sansone, had given birth to a baby boy, Jude, on March 13 — which made it a good thing that the 34-year-old pop singer had driven down from the couple’s home in Santa Barbara early this month for a busy day of album promo before activating Dad Mode for a while.Due Friday, “Whatever’s Clever!” is Puth’s fourth LP since he broke out in 2015 with “See You Again,” his 14-times-platinum collaboration with the rapper Wiz Khalifa from the “Fast and Furious” movie franchise.Yet he says it’s the first one “where things are lining up musically in my life — like I’m living what the album is about.”In “Changes,” the album’s opener, Puth anticipates the arrival of “new directions and lessons,” while “Home” rhymes “rose-colored lenses” with “white picket fences”; other tracks contemplate his relationships with his dad and his younger brother and look back to his upbringing in suburban New Jersey.When he was younger, Puth said, he believed an artist was supposed to separate his life from his career.

“Picture a hard drive,” said the singer, a graduate of both the Manhattan School of Music and Berklee College of Music.“One partition is your life, and you keep that private.

The other partition is your career — that’s where you dye your hair a different color and you speak a little bit differently because you’re an artist.” He shook his head.“My wife was the person who told me, ‘You just need to be you,’” he said, though he also credits Taylor Swift for changing...