T-Pain may be best known for Auto-Tune-heavy party starters, but his fifth studio album, Oblivion, out Nov. 17 on RCA — his first full-length LP in six years following 2011’s Revolver — digs deeper than before. The singer details the stories behind his choice tracks from his grand return to music.
“Straight”
“The song is basically me saying, ‘I’ma get you straight.’ When [my wife and I] go places, she doesn’t want to seem like she’s spending a lot of money, but she is, all the time, and she’s always like, ‘Well, I don’t want to get too much’ or ‘I don’t want to make you carry too many bags.’ So I always tell her, ‘Get everything you want, every version of what you want, whatever it is.’ I had to make this song [to tell her] you have that kind of life — you’re rich, you’re fine, so just do whatever you want to do.”
“Pussy On The Phone”
“A while ago I had a female assistant, and she was talking to her boyfriend on the phone, and he was drunk as hell. She put him on speakerphone just so we could hear all the funny shit he was saying, and that n—a told her, ‘Baby, put that pussy on the phone,’ and that had to be the funniest fucking thing I’ve ever heard a man say in my life. That shit was amazing. I always think about that. It’s a trap, turn-up type of song.”
“Who Died”
“It has a dope horn sample, and some of the lyrics are reminiscent of younger me. It’s more of a rap track than anything else; it has a midtempo beat and nice bounce to it. It’s titled ‘Who Died’ because everybody feels like they can tell me how to do music. The message of the whole song is like, ‘Who died and made you boss of me?’ It was one of those ‘everybody shut the hell up’ songs — it intros the album like, ‘Let me do my thing.’ It’s the most vulnerable [track] on the album.”
This article originally appeared in the Nov. 18 issue of Billboard.