Emotional Charlie Puth brought to tears over 'surreal' experience on 'Songland'

Charlie Puth was the guest on NBC's Songland this week looking for his next hit. The 27-year-old pop singer knows a thing or two about what it's like to be a young, aspiring songwriter. In fact, on Wednesday, he even reminisced on how just a few years ago, he was only writing for and collaborating with other artists, before he started really making waves on his own. It was because that chapter of his life was so recent, that the pop star got a little emotional. "I'm just gonna speak from my heart right now. A lot of people all my life looked at me, you know, 'Why doesn't Charlie get a real job,' and, um, you know, 'What is he gonna do? Like, write songs about his life forever?' I would wait outside of record labels and they would tell me that my songs were corny and that I should just stay in school and just get, like, a normal job," said Puth. "It's just kinda surreal that I'm sitting here in this chair and having people consider songs for me right now." On top of his walk down memory lane, Puth also had a surprise reunion with one of his former classmates from college earlier in the show. Ultimately, the winning song Puth chose was Zach Sorgen's "Bad Habit" and, at the end of the show, rather than seeing a music video for Puth's version of the song, we were treated to an actual performance. However, shortly after the airing of Puth's episode, the singer took to social media to explain why his version of "Bad Habit" wasn't released, and why the original songwriter Zach Sorgen's was instead. Puth tweeted: "As a singer-songwriter myself, it is important for me to recognize that sometimes a song deserves to be released by the person who wrote it. 'Bad Habit' is truly something special, and should be Zach's song to put out into the world."