Wearing a top hat and crooning like an R&B cyborg, T-Pain turned his love of strippers into pop-chart dominance. Now if only he could get his wife to go to bed with him.
In the process, he’s turned Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, Lil Wayne and Kanye West into Auto-Tune junkies too: “At first, I was real pissed about them using the effect,” he says. “Like,
You guys don’t need this—I do!” More aligned with the T-Pain spirit are the thousands of Auto-Tune-wielding bedroom amateurs who mine a million-dollar sound on the cheap. “There’s been a whopping uptick in sales since T-Pain became really popular,” says Marco Alpert, VP of marketing at Antares, the tiny Northern California company that makes Auto-Tune. (He adds that deep discounts on the last version of the program and buzz surrounding a brand-new edition aided the boost, too). “Musicians used to be reluctant to say they used pitch correction. Today, it’s open season.”
Of course, even if T-Pain stays in touch with his pre-fame self, he isn’t that guy anymore. He’s now rich enough to indulge his wildest eccentricities: He orders custom top hats from a London haberdashery (“I got about 300 of ’em now”). He just bought a ’70s-era hearse, painted it Miami Dolphins orange and is installing a sound system worth tens of thousands of dollars … inside a coffin. “There’ll be a skeleton under Plexiglas, too,” he says. “That’s gonna be my L.A. car.”
Still, for all the money he’s made, he says it can be difficult navigating between the guy who sold garlic crabs and the R&B superstar he’s becoming. He’s at that stage in his career where the veil of celebrity has yet to fully descend. He was amazed, and relieved, when he met Ludacris and discovered that they could communicate, like everyday dudes do, in movie dialogue. “We were quoting back and forth from
Walk Hard,” T-Pain recalls. “I was like,
You’ve seen that, too?” He’s amused, and miffed, when a tourist family spots him on the sidewalk and asks his bodyguard, “Is that T-Pain?” He climbs into his SUV, pulls the door closed and tosses up his palms. “Who the fuck do you think it is?” he asks. “Is there another motherfucker out here with a lime-green top hat?”
Some of the changes are grimmer. His wealth, he says, is driving a wedge between him and his family. At the start, he was managed by his father—an arrangement that ended after T-Pain signed to Akon’s label. “Now my dad asks for money every time I talk to him, and that’s just weird. He and I used to get along fantastic—until all the dollar signs.” This is an element of success T-Pain hates more than work, because he can’t goof it away. His parents split up when he was 18, right when his career began in earnest: “I felt it was my fault, because it was about shit that happened on the road.
“My whole family, man, they see what they see and they automatically ask for stuff,” he continues. “It ain’t a problem except when they ask for shit they don’t need. I bought my mom a house and a Porsche truck. I bought my sister a Buick truck. I gave my dad $20,000. I didn’t even feel that one. But he asked for more, like, two days later. It got to the point where he straight up said, ‘Gimme $250,000 and you don’t have to worry about me no more.’ Like, what the fuck? That’s a payoff for your dad. God damn.”
Many rap horn-dogs talk about the inspiration they get out of strip clubs. When he was 15, T-Pain got a life-changing experience. “In Tallahassee, dudes would hire girls at their house and charge admission,” he recalls. “I remember fucking one girl on a couch in the living room, in front of everyone. She kept her skirt on so it looked like a real intense lap dance. I
loooved that!”
The muse hasn’t left him since, but these days, T-Pain’s strip-club visits are less of a contact sport. He got married at 18 (he proposed in a Bennigan’s), and he has two children with his wife, Amber: daughter Lyriq, 4, and son Muzyq, 1. T-Pain paints a lively picture of domestic bliss: “My wife and I download pornos together,” he says. “She goes with me to strip clubs. She’ll be tipping bitches and everything.” More sweetly: “I love reading my daughter to sleep—she loves this one book called
Ducks in Muck.” And, combining the smutty and the sweet: “I’ll be at a club, just surrounded by ho’s, and I’ll literally call my wife, like, ‘I’m so, so happy I married you.’”
His marriage helps him to put the surreal life into perspective, and it helps him to keep sight of Faheem Najm when he’s recording as T-Pain. Even if it isn’t the sexiest topic, he enjoys mining aspects of matrimony for material. One of the funniest moments on
Thr33 Ringz comes on the song “Therapy,” where a narrator tells an unloving woman, “I don’t need your sex, I’ll masturbate.”
“See, that line comes straight out of my life!” he says. “I’m married, and I jerk off all the time. Some R&B singers act like they getting sex every night. T-Pain is here to tell you: Ain’t no one getting sex every night!”