The Story Behind Charlie Puth’s New Yacht-Rock Song

Charlie Puth is earnest enough — or, as he now can acknowledge, cringey enough — to admit he uses music as a manifestation tool. “I write down a manifesto that I want to accomplish,” he recently explained. “When you put pen to paper, it always seems to happen.” Puth adhered to that ritual while working on his fourth album, Whatever’s Clever!, which arrives as the musician becomes a new father. And as any major dude will tell you, dads love a certain windswept genre of music and can list off the full credits for every member of Toto. “I knew I wanted to make a song that was so yacht rock in 2026,” Puth said. “So how am I going to make that and not put the guys who invented the genre on the song with me?”

The result is “Love in Exile,” a three-minute sail down the harbor that features the captains of yacht rock, Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins — marking a reunion of sorts for the duo, who haven’t collaborated in nearly a decade. The trio trade verses and backing vocals while Puth defers to his heroes for their keyboards and guitar, respectively. The way Puth tells it, he got cleared by managers to contact McDonald and Loggins “in a very traditional sense” before he decided to text them personally. “I really wanted them,” he said. “I went as far as showing them examples of what kind of song we could write and how I would record them. I’m lucky enough where I’ve made a little bit of a name for myself where I can have the privilege of reaching out.” They both responded positively to Puth’s idea, and it helped that everyone lived near one another in the Santa Barbara area. “It became musically casual and easy, to the point where Mike would be like, ‘Hey, I’m, like, 20 minutes early. You wanna go get a coffee?’” Puth recalled. “We got to that friendship level.”

The modest studio in Puth’s home provided the setting for the recording session: A laptop, piano, and microphone were all he laid out. Right away, Puth was exposed to a faster pace of working. “Kenny came in, parked his car, and said, ‘The title is ‘Love in Exile.’ I’m like, ‘Love it, great. Sounds like a novel,’” he recalled. “Kenny said he wanted to reverse engineer the song, so I had to ask, ‘What does that mean?’ And he said, ‘It doesn’t matter. We’re gonna figure it out as we go.’” Puth used this as a lesson to lie back and take direction from the men who once wrote “What a Fool Believes” and “This Is It” together.

“I went to the piano and started playing something that was cool, but it wasn’t killing any of us,” he explained. “It wasn’t making us feel anything. So Kenny came over to me, holding his guitar, and said, ‘I think you should let Mike play the keyboard.’ I’m like, ‘Absolutely.’ I was scared to ask.” McDonald improvised the chords that would, indeed, serve as the melodic sails for “Love in Exile.” “Once I felt it was like a shuffle, I heard the whole thing in my head,” Puth said. “We recorded and chopped up bits of his piano playing and put on a temporary drum so we could write to it. We wrote it as if a band was playing along with us.” The song — which bounces along like Donald Fagen’s “I.G.Y.” — was finalized at Conway Recording Studios in Hollywood several weeks later.

McDonald said he and Puth were like “passing ships in the night” for years before they convened. “A friend had mentioned in the past that Charlie expressed interest in writing with me. I wanted to take him up on that, but it left me in this position of cold-calling him, and I was afraid my friend might have been the more enthusiastic party,” McDonald recalled with a laugh. “I didn’t want to out of the blue go, ‘Hey, how would you like to write?,’ and put him on the spot. So I waited for an opportunity like this to arise.” It was Loggins who called his old friend to give him the final push to accept the “Love in Exile” session. “He’s good about being more proactive,” McDonald noted. “It’s usually Kenny who steps up and makes the intro to a situation like this.”

McDonald and Loggins hadn’t seen each other in quite some time before descending upon Puth’s studio. “We’ve actually talked to each other a lot more lately than we would have,” McDonald said. (Puth added, “It was great seeing two friends who are forever musically bonded get back together again like it was nothing.”) McDonald was expecting a few nerves to bubble up during the recording process, which has become a more common feeling as he’s gotten older. “When you’re a guy my age helping out on a song, you always deal with a certain amount of trepidation,” he explained. “Am I going to sound like Mrs. Miller or Robert Goulet on this thing? I’m always feeling that way these days.” Yet it’s a challenge he has welcomed, especially with Puth as such an ideal skipper.

“What else have I got to do but feel a little anxious in a situation? I know at least I’ll do my best,” he said. “Or else I’ll stay home on the couch and watch HGTV. I’m surprised at how gracious the young artists are. That’s really encouraging to someone my age who’s still doing this for a living and trying not to be complacent with my past.” And unlike some of their peers, McDonald and Loggins have both embraced yacht rock as a genre phenomenon, even appearing in a recent documentary on the subject for HBO. “I was introduced to the term yacht rock when it was meant to be pathetic-comic humor. But I remember telling my son, ‘Don’t laugh. Someday when your music becomes less relevant, your pathetic-comic value may come in handy,’” McDonald said. “Classic-rock ‘oldies’ radio became lifesavers for guys from the ’70s. We could’ve gotten lost in the haze of the past, but yacht rock is the latest incarnation of those radio genres. When I sit back and think about all of those people who fit that category — Steely Dan, the Eagles, the Doobie Brothers, and Hall & Oates — I stop and go, I can’t think of a group I’d be prouder to be a part of.”

Puth, who listed his favorite yacht-rock songs as Steely Dan’s “Hey Nineteen” and Toto’s “Rosanna,” wasn’t tempted to recruit more of those genre mates for “Love in Exile,” even if the idea of a quintet supergroup with Boz Scaggs and Christopher Cross made him chuckle. “I didn’t want to be gluttonous,” he stressed. “It’s not what the song called for.” Funnily enough, though, Puth reached out to Bruce Hornsby to possibly provide a solo for another Whatever’s Clever! track. “He very graciously emailed me back and said, ‘This song sounds finished. I don’t know what I can add to it,’” Puth said. “I was blown away by the restraint.” Hey, that’s just the way it is.