Entertainment Music Charlie Puth Reveals How Selena Gomez Fling 'Really Messed Me Up' — and Inspired His New Music Charlie Puth is opening up about his brief, tumultuous fling with Selena Gomez, and how it inspired their duet, "We Don't Talk Anymore" By Jordan Runtagh Jordan Runtagh Jordan Runtagh is an executive podcast producer at iHeartRadio, where he hosts a slate of pop culture shows including Too Much Information, Inside the Studio, Off the Record and Rivals: Music's Greatest Feuds. Previously, he served as a music editor at PEOPLE and VH1.com. He's written about art and entertainment for more than a decade, regularly contributing to outlets like Rolling Stone and Entertainment Weekly, and appearing as a guest on radio and television. Over the course of his career, he's profiled the surviving Beatles, Brian Wilson, Aretha Franklin, Roger Waters, David Byrne, Pete Townshend, Debbie Harry, Quincy Jones, Brian May, Jerry Lee Lewis, James Taylor and many more. A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, he lives in Brooklyn, where he can be found DJing '60s soul records. People Editorial Guidelines Published on February 1, 2018 02:15PM EST Before her relationship with the Weeknd and prior to reuniting with Justin Bieber last fall, Selena Gomez had a rumored love connection with Charlie Puth in 2016. While both stayed mum at the time, Puth is opening up about their brief, tumultuous fling — specifically how it inspired their duet, “We Don’t Talk Anymore.” “I don’t kiss and tell, but the only way a song like that can come across as real is if there’s something else going on behind the scenes,” Puth, 26, says of the song in the latest Billboard cover story. “And that’s what was happening [with Gomez]. Very short-lived, very small, but very impactful. And it really messed me up. I’m trying to put this the best way possible: It wasn’t like I was the only person on her mind. And I think I knew that going in — what I was getting myself into.” Ramona Rosales Though he doesn’t name names, it’s possible that the other guy on Gomez’s mind was Bieber, with whom she parted company in 2015. The song details the wind-down of a romance. “It’s about a particular moment in my life, when someone very close to me wanted the attention of somebody else,” Puth says, before admitting that he wasn’t entirely blameless in the relationship’s dissolution. “When I found that out and we ended it, I might have done some shady things too, and she might have asked me, ‘How long has this been going on?'” Ramona Rosales To move forward, he channeled the feelings into his art. “You gather up a bunch of emotion with the life shovel, throw it in the life bucket, mix it up. And she evoked such good emotion on that song, it was a pleasure working with her. That’s why I’m always happy to sing it, even though it came from a dark point in my life.” Ramona Rosales RELATED VIDEO: Why Did Charlie Puth Have Selena Gomez Record a Song in His Closet? Puth also recalled another dark point: the time he ate “like, a pound of marijuana cookies” after “super-starring out a little too much” with “See You Again” partner Wiz Khalifa. The result was a prolonged, six-hour freakout that turned him off the drug indefinitely. “I should have been sedated,” he says. “I think I almost died. … I thought I had to party and date a lot of girls and just go crazy. I thought it was what was expected of me as a musician.” Luckily, someone was looking out. Puth admits, “My mom was the one who was like, ‘You’re losing touch with why you got here.'”