Charlie Burg hits that sweet spot between soul and sensitivity—a songwriter that captures in-the-moment feelings to engage in deeper reflection, wrapped in genre-resistant sounds that simultaneously resemble modern pop’s fluidity and a certain generation-spanning timelessness. At the age of 23, he’s already cut an impressive figure on his own; and with the arrival of his new single “Channel Orange in Your Living Room,” he clearly has nowhere to go but up.
Music has always been in the Michigan-hailing artist’s life. When Burg was five years old he sang in the Jewish synagogue with his siblings and soon found his father’s acoustic guitar in his hands, self-teaching songs from the Beatles and Coldplay as part of his musical journey. Early influences spanned the classic sounds of Motown, Hall & Oates, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King, along with formative teenage touchstones like pop-punk and hip-hop.
Burg started writing his own songs when he got to college—a formative time in which he began to draw from the soulful music that dotted his youth and upbringing. “I started accepting the soul part of my influence when I realized that I wasn’t alone in loving it while I was in college,” he explains. “That’s when I started incorporating it more into my songwriting.” After graduating from college in upstate New York where he studied jazz guitar and the music business, he traveled for a bit and eventually landed in Brooklyn with a few fellow graduates who now make up his management team.
Over the last three years, Burg released three EPs — Violet, Moonlight, and Fever — which he describes as “a big marking of progress in both my sound and my musical development.” During that time, he’s been absorbing current influences ranging from The Strokes, Channel Orange-era Frank Ocean, and Lorde to Sade and D’Angelo’s neo-soul masterpiece Voodoo, the latter of which he states “helps me learn about groove and inflection.”
