People would never associate country music with T-Pain. Even when he gave a pretty stirring cover of Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey”, you’d never imagine a full pivot into Nashville. After all, just about any and everyone loves “Tennessee Whiskey”. That doesn’t make someone country.
However, what we didn’t know is that T-Pain had been quietly working behind the scenes in Nashville for some years. In a 2024 interview with Billboard, he recalled how country fans reacted to his desire to work with Carrie Underwood.
“They asked me who I wanted to work with, and I said Carrie Underwood,” he told the publication. “The country fans were like, ‘She don’t work with j*****oos. She has too much class for somebody like you. Why would she ever…’ And I was giving her props!”
But eventually, Pain won out in the end. Some of country’s biggest artists in the 2010s were coming to him to ghostwrite their songs.
T-Pain Took Over Country At One Point In The 2010s
“I actually lived in Nashville for a while, ghostwriting for country artists from 2014 to ’16. Everybody kept trying to figure out why Luke Bryan was saying ‘T-Pain’ in all his songs for a second,” the Florida legend laughed. “Rhett Akins, Dallas Davidson, Toby Keith, I was writing stuff for him. Georgia Florida? Florida Georgia? Whichever way that goes.”
This outlook made Pain empathize with Beyoncé and her plight, dealing with industry pushback from Nashville. But ultimately, he believed that she could stay as long as she wanted to, given her skillset. Admittedly, he didn’t see the same for himself.
“Beyoncé is strong enough to keep it going. It’s easier for her to stay in it than me,” T-Pain said. “I’m not up at that level, so I can’t punch through that kind of stuff. So I kept doing it, but I just stopped taking credit.”
T-Pain found an easy way to move on from his Country era
Thankfully, the Autotune pioneer didn’t have this issue when he covered Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs”. If anything, Ozzy Osbourne embraced him more than anyone. “This is the best cover of “War Pigs” ever. Why didn’t you guys call me?” Osbourne said in 2024.
T-Pain actually had an affinity for the record because of Jack Black’s cover in 2011. “Like, ‘War Pigs’ — I would always go to a clip of Jack Black singing it on a talk show,” T-Pain told Stereogum in 2023. “Anytime Jack Black comes up in conversation, I always go to that clip and just show people that he did ‘War Pigs.’ I grew a liking to the song from that.”
The post T-Pain Recalls His Most Racist Backlash Coming From Time He Spent ‘Ghostwriting’ in a Completely Different Genre appeared first on VICE.
