T-Pain…the country music writing guru?
We know that the popular rapper certainly has the pipes to do country some justice if he wanted to. Just listen to his stirring rendition of “Tennessee Whiskey” and try to argue otherwise.
It honestly sounds like T-Pain, whose real name is Faheem Rashad Najm, would love to be more engrossed in the country music world. A video he posted on his Instagram this past week revealed that he gets a lot of what he works with from the country genre:
“Good music is good music. I don’t give a f**k where it comes from or what style it comes in.
All the people I know feel like it’s ‘not cool’ to listen to other genres of music, but country (and gospel) music is where I get all my harmonies from.”
And as it turns out, he’s actually written a number of country music songs (or so he claims), there’s just no way of knowing which specific ones he was behind. Convenient…
T-Pain claims that he doesn’t like to credit himself on country music songs because it’s not worth the racist backlash that often comes with it:
“I’ve wrote a lot of country songs, stopped taking credit for it because as cool as it is to see your name in the credits and sh*t like that, the racism that comes after it is just…
I’ll just take the check. Don’t put me on that sh*t. I’ll just take the check, bro. Never mind dude, you know what I mean?”
If that’s the truth, that’s terribly unfortunate for T-Pain, who was somewhat blackballed from the music industry anyways because of his open use of autotune. Or at least regarded as an unserious and untalented artist.
In this conversation, he says “huge country artists would rather not have it known” that he contributed to their songs. He cites Taylor Swift, Luke Bryan, Rhett Akins, and Dallas Davidson as people he has written with.
“I write a lot of country music for huge country artists that would rather have it not known that I did it. I lived in Nashville for 10 years… I’ve written a lot of sh*t for a lot of very important country artists.”
That being said, I’m still pretty skeptical.
He said he stopped taking credit for country songs he’s written, but I can’t find any instances where he started. Maybe he’s written some demos with a few notable songwriters and they never got recorded, or I guess he had his name scrubbed from all these alleged hits, but I would love to know which songs.
And if we’re talking about “Thug Story” with Taylor Swift…. c’mon…
