After Greyson Chance excoriated Ellen DeGeneres and her now-defunct record label as “manipulative,” “self-centered” and “blatantly opportunistic,” Charlie Puth is weighing in with his own experience.
In a new interview with Rolling Stone, Puth shared that he also felt abandoned by the former talk show host’s label eleveneleven shortly after signing with them in 2011, but his disappointment doesn’t extend to DeGeneres herself.
“We both have different experiences, me versus Greyson,” he told the outlet. He did agree, however, “that no one was present, certainly, after the creation of my first demo EP.”
Put was clear not to put “any blame on one person,” though, instead choosing to blame the “collective … all the people that were in that room, they just disappeared. I didn’t hear from anybody.”
A source close to DeGeneres’ team told RS that they don’t recall this happening. TooFab has also reach out to DeGeneres’ team. Puth further said that he never brought it up with DeGeneres. He has appeared on her show multiple times since 2011.
In fact, despite his negative experiences with eleveneleven, he pushed back against the narrative of DeGeneres herself as “rude.” “I’ve never experienced that,” he said. “Maybe she likes me.”
Puth first came to prominence after a YouTube video of him singing Adele’s “Someone Like You” with Emily Luther went viral in 2011 after winning an online singing competition. Both would wind up singing the song on the “Ellen” show, and get signed to her label. A year later, after releasing a promotional single, Puth left eleveneleven.
After his own bombshell interview with Rolling Stone, Chance stood by his comments regarding DeGeneres and her defunct label with a TikTok video posted on September 22.
“I stand behind all of it,” the 25-year-old said in his follow-up video. “You know, I’ve been wanting to tell this story now for multiple years and was repeatedly told not to but the truth is, what you saw on TV and what was pitched out to the mainstream just wasn’t what was happening behind the scenes.”
Chance first appeared on DeGeneres’ show in 2010 at 12 years old after a video of him performing Lady Gaga’s “Paparazzi” went viral. “Now that I’m 25 and I’m older, I can recognize that what happened to me as a kid was not cool,” he noted.
Chance further acknowledged that some will call him “ungrateful” for the efforts DeGeneres and her team put into him in the beginning of their relationship, with him saying that he is grateful for that, but “more grateful to myself for the moments when I got dropped and everything went awry when I was a kid. I’m thankful to 15-year-old me that picked up the pieces and kept on going and kept on fighting.”
Chance’s frustrations also extended to DeGeneres herself, with him saying was “domineering and way too controlling,” including everything from allegedly dictating what he would wear and berating his mother.
A source close to DeGeneres’ show told People that they “went above and beyond to help set him up for success, but in business that doesn’t always work out, and his career did not take off.” Chance did continue to appear on her show in subsequent years. Like Puth, he did not talk about his negative experiences with the label.
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