Top of the Hip-Hop/R&B Heap!

By: Sonia Murray
(Atlanta Journal-Constitution; Nov. 11, 2008; E1)

Turn on the radio and Atlanta singer-rapper T-Pain is easy to find---he's the one who sounds like he's having the most fun.

Little wonder then that in real life T-Pain is every bit the funny and likable guy he appears to be on record. The 23-year-old born Faheem Najm may have taken on the stage name of T-Pain (short for Tallahassee Pain) because of his rough start in his Florida hometown, but rough is hardly the adjective one would use to describe the life these days of a Grammy winner living in a $1 million Duluth home with a Lamborghini out front.

Because T-Pain is seemingly on every other single on the radio dial, expectations are high for his third solo CD. The album is titled Thr33 Ringz in large part because T-Pain feels like a ringleader of the music industry game.

It's a little hard to deny him this claim. Kanye West is using T-Pain's signature vocoder effect (a synthesizer-type sound with the tone and tempo of the singer's voice) on his next album. He flew T-Pain to Hawaii for five days to make sure he was doing it right. Lil Wayne and Chris Brown have started to add the style to their vocals. "That's when I started to realize - like about a couple of months ago - I was really changing the game. When everybody started doing what I was doing," T-Pain says. "T-Pain's assists, period, makes records better," Ludacris affirms.

"I can't say enough about him and his talents," adds BET Sr. Vice President Stephen Hill, who asked T-Pain to host its recent Hip-Hop Awards. "He's funny, a nice guy and easy to work with."

T-Pain has broken ringtone records singing about simple things like buying a drink or being in love with a stripper. "People have been slow to give him credit for his talent," says Jive Records VP MempHitz, who signed T-Pain. "But when I first heard him, he reminded me of R. Kelly - he could sing, write, produce, the works!"

"When I was broke ... I was still trying to figure out a way to make a mixtape or something," says T-Pain, who now owns 22 automobiles. "And yeah what I make, what I've always made is some of the most regular stuff in the world. That's why people can relate. Everybody is so busy concentrating on a song, trying to be different or abstract; instead of just being a basic, beautiful picture. Ya'll are making it too easy for me to run this circus."