Despite having hit singles like "Buy U A Drank" and "Bartender" in his discography, T-Pain is an artist who has mostly flown under the radar in recent years. Undergoing a stylistic transformation, he's morphed from an out-and-out rapper to a bit of an R&B crooner, capable of hitting notes that no one would have thought possible form the auto-tune godfather even 10 years ago. However, that may not be the only factor for his underperformance on the market after his Epiphany album. As he told Joe Budden, DJ Akademiks and Nadeska Alexis on the latest episode of Everyday Struggle, his record label, RCA, also played a part in the damage done.
According to T-Pain, "every single I picked, every f**king single I picked, went Platinum. Every single I picked!" However, when that decision-making was no longer left up to him, that's when his career began to go south. "When I stopped picking my singles, and they told me, 'Yo, you was wrong this one time.' I picked a single just to put out, it was for Tallahassee or some s**t like that, and they were like, 'It didn't work worldwide, so how about we pick the next one.'" Needless to say, the artist born Faheem Rashad Najm has some regrets about how things went down in this regard.
"They took a record that I wrote for one of my artists, a group I had, One Chance. I wrote a record for them, it was a smash for them, they took the record from them, put the s**t out, I got negative spins on the radio," he added. "I ain't never seen that s**t in my life," Pain added. "That s**t started really hurting me." There's telling if the same approach will be used with T-Pain's upcoming LP, Oblivion. Heralded as his big return to form, there's whispers that he may have left auto-tune behind in large part on these new recordings, although one can only pass final judgement on that aspect when the record is released at long last.
While you're waiting on T-Pain's upcoming album, check out his collab with Blac Youngsta, entitled "Goal Line," here.
