T-Pain talks about his name, upcoming albums and his interestingly nicknamed tour bus
Posted on April 21, 2008
Why do they call you T-Pain? Where does the nickname come from?
Basically the “T” stands for Tallahassee, Florida where I’m from, and the pain stands for the struggle and the hard work it took to get out of Tallahassee in order to make it, you know, and be here today. So basically you get the Tallahassee pain, the Tallahassee struggle is a better, you know what I’m saying, explanation of it.
Who have you been most excited to work with so far?
Chris Brown, prolly be the one. He’s the only one closest to my age.
What’s your biggest influence? The biggest influence on your song writing?
The challenge of people thinking that I can’t do it anyways. People like trying to guess how I did or trying to figure out who I called while I was writing. I like seeing people thinking I can’t do it and then I just do it out of nowhere.
How long have you been on tour and have you been doing mostly college campuses?
Yeah, colleges, House of Blues, started two weeks ago and we go about another month.
Have there been any good places you’ve visited so far?
Not really actually, haven’t got kicked out of anywhere.
How have you handled your success so far?
Just always know [there’s] a higher level. No matter what you’re doing, you can be doing way better. There’s no top to this.
What are your future plans? Do you have any singles coming out? Any albums?
Yeah we actually do. We drop in the end of May, dropping the single, the name of the new album is Three Rings, that’s why I’ve been wearing the top hat [with the three rings]. I’m just dropping a lot of my stuff right now.
How long have you been working on it?
A month and a half. Something like that. It was kinda rollin’ because I didn’t do anything for a long time, I did like three months without even touching a microphone. So when I got back on it, I did like 20 songs in a week.
Who is collaborating on it with you?
I didn’t do any collaborations yet, so what I’m doing is I’m just finishing my parts of it and if I feel like it needs a collaboration. I’ll take one of my versions off and put somebody else on it, you know what I’m sayin’. So I’m just making sure my part is done so when I do get the collaboration all I gotta do is get them on it and I don’t have to come back and redo all my crap.
