Charli Taft

Charlotte Taft was born in Liverpool, England, to parents who both taught music at Liverpool Community College. Taft, the oldest of two children, was raised in what she calls "a very vibrant, musical household" which influenced her to pursue a career in music. From her childhood, she had aspirations to enter the music industry and sang at local talent shows and concerts. She appeared on a Disney Channel show when she was 12, singing on national television for the first time. At age 15, she was writing songs for herself which she stated she started performing for "anyone who would listen".^[1][2][3]

Taft attended Merchant Taylor's school and St. Edward's College and then completed her degree at the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. There she won the Beatles Songwriting Prize and gained a first class honours degree in performance. She was chosen to meet Paul McCartney for a private one-to-one songwriting tutorial. Taft then moved to London to look for work and later joined teams in Scandinavia as a hired writer.

When she was starting out as a songwriter, Taft made around a dozen trips to Stockholm and Copenhagen, where she wrote for some of the most prominent names in the music industry. In 2014, she was one of 14 acts awarded funding of over £250,000 by the British government as part of a plan to promote their artists overseas. She then used this money to travel to Seoul to start writing for South Korean artists.^[1][4]

While still in Europe, Taft met fellow songwriter Daniel "Obi" Klein, with whom she would later collaborate on a number of songs, at a songwriting camp in Copenhagen. They wrote the song "Lips" which was released by South Korean girl group Girls' Generation in 2013 as a track from their third Japanese studio album Love & Peace.^[5] The group's company S.M. Entertainment invited Taft to come to Seoul and take part in songwriting camps at SM Studios. In 2014, she co-produced a song for Japanese artist Namie Amuro^[2] and in August, S.M. Entertainment artist and Shinee member Taemin released "Ace", which Taft composed with Klein, Deez and Ylva Dimberg, as a track from his first extended play of the same name.

On Taft's first trip to South Korea, she wrote the song "Automatic" with Klein; it was released in 2015 by another S.M. Entertainment girl group, Red Velvet, as one of two singles they promoted for their first extended play Ice Cream Cake.^[2] Months later, she and Klein co-produced another song for the group titled "Time Slip" which was a track in their first studio album The Red. In the same year, she released her debut single "Pieces" on 30 November.^[6]

She collaborated with Klein again in 2016 for another Red Velvet track, "Cool Hot Sweet Love", which featured on their second extended play, The Velvet.^[7] In January 2017, S.M. Entertainment's first girl group S.E.S. released their reunion album, 14 years after their disbandment, which included a track co-written by Taft, Klein, Lee Hyun-seung, DOM and Teddy Riley. In May, another song she wrote with Klein was released as a single by South Korean girl group Loona, titled "Eclipse". She would later write two more songs for the group in the same year, one for the group's sub-unit Odd Eye Circle called "Sweet Crazy Love" which was chosen by Billboard as one of their 20 Best K-pop Songs of 2017.^[8] On 28 July, Taft released the single "Love Like You" along with an accompanying music video as part of the second season of S.M. Entertainment's digital music project, SM Station. The song had been written for herself while still in the UK and she had planned on releasing it independently before a representative of the company approached her at a lunch meeting in Copenhagen about being involved in the project.^[9][2][10] Taft once again worked with Red Velvet for their second studio album Perfect Velvet which has two songs co-written by Taft, "Look" and "Perfect 10". In December, she collaborated with Klein and Andreas Öberg for the song "Christmas Without You" which Girls' Generation member Taeyeon released as a track for her Christmas album This Christmas: Winter Is Coming.^[11]

On 1 September 2018, Taft married Klein.^[12]