Up All Night

Charlie Puth sings here about being smitten with a girl who is playing games with him. He wrote the song with Katy Perry's frequent songwriting partner Bonnie McKee. Puth told AT40: "I was talking with Bonnie, who was going through a tough time with this guy wanting [him] to like her, and I didn't tell her that I was having a tough time with this girl wanting to like me, and it was the first time that I've been in a session where two people were both experiencing the same feeling, but didn't tell each other, but we found it out through music. So that's pretty cool."

Bonnie McKee was an established songwriter when she was paired with Puth, who had yet to released his first album. She wasn't happy about working with a newbie, but was pleasantly surprised when Puth turned out to be terrific songwriting partner and receptive to her ideas. In most songwriting sessions, McKee helps the artist tell their story, but in this one it was Puth telling her tale. Puth ended up co-writing two songs with McKee for her to sing: a Christmas song called "California Winter," and her 2015 cut "Bombastic," which ended up in the trailer for the 2019 movie Charlie's Angels.

In a Songfacts interview with Bonnie McKee, she revealed the inspiration for this song: "I had literally been up all night the night before dealing with a boyfriend that was giving me the run-around," she said. "We were in a grey area if I remember correctly. It was just driving me crazy - it was that 'are we or aren't we' kind of moment. Charlie was young and inexperienced at the time, but he's very empathetic and he knows how to tell a story, so when I told him what was going on, he was able to help me spin that into a song."