(Credit: Hannibal Matthews)
Last year, I began asking every artist that I interviewed about the first time they heard themselves on the radio. I’m not quite sure where exactly I came up with the question, but it was always one of those moments in an interview that each artist would light up as they told me about it. I mentioned it one day in a meeting and everyone seemed to like the idea. Somehow, it became a big initiative right before the GRAMMYs and ACM Awards and many of the artists I asked this wound up in a commercial for Radio.com. On TV!
Later in the year, we decided to make it a weekly feature so every Monday I assign and help select some of the best answers to that question. This week’s feature is T-Pain, the very first rapper I’ve ever interviewed. His answer was a rather unique one.
“The first song of mine that I heard on the radio was ‘Time To Make Love,'” he told me. “I don’t even think it was on my first album. It was part of a mixtape I did before it came out. I was in my dad’s house in my room asleep. I definitely heard it in my sleep and I woke up and was like, ‘Oh man, I totally missed it!’ I definitely heard it but I was dreaming. I was laying down in my dream, but when I woke up I was like, ‘Oh that was really on the radio just then!’ I wish I had woken up a little earlier.”
He went on to tell me about his next album, Stoicville: Rise of the Phoenix, due out later this year.
“It’s a crazy range of songs, from swing songs and songs from the 60s to reggae songs and R&B,” he said. “I’m putting a country song on my album. There’s a lot of range so it’s hard to say what we want the sound to be. Anything that we pick will be a lot of range.”
For my complete interview, visit Radio.com. Stay tuned for more of my chat with T-Pain!