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What’s It Like To Be T-Pain Now?

T-Pain tells Billboard about embracing his true voice and translating his passions for Twitch, song covers and more into viable businesses.

Back then, the Florida teen born Faheem Najm to a family of Bahamian Muslims had a stage name short for “Tallahassee Pain” and ambitions as a rapper that shifted when he heard the uncanny vocal effect applied to a remix of Jennifer Lopez’s “If You Had My Love.” In 2004, the 19-year-old inked a deal with Akon’s Konvict Muzik label, having caught the singer’s ear with a cover of his song “Locked Up” edited to be about having a busted car. It was on a 2016 trip to Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, that Pain discovered drifting, a style of precision driving seen in the Fast and the Furious franchise, which he describes as “being in control of an out-of-control car.” He was already an auto fanatic, at one point owning 46 vehicles (in part because his former managers knew that buying him a new one was the surest way to convince him to record a song). Pain’s nerdier passions have now found their way into his songs: For his latest solo single, the anthemic (and un-Auto-Tuned) “Dreaming,” he spent a month learning the 3D graphics software Blender in his spare time to animate the video, complete with exploding volcanoes, a Grand Theft Auto-style street scene and an impressively faithful rendering of himself.

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