T-Pain dropped by the day-job on Monday to do a short, lo-fi set for the NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series, and even he had to acknowledge that “T-Pain + lo-fi” and “T-Pain + NPR” aren’t the most obvious associations. “I know everyone is wondering where the Auto-Tune is gonna come from,” he said. “It’s right here in my pocket, surgically inserted.”
T-Pain’s relationship to Auto-Tune, the gimmick with which he’s almost associated, is a complicated one, as this New Yorker profile from the summer showed. I’d heard tell that T-Pain had some real, serious pipes, so I went to the Tiny Desk performance partly to see for myself.
Suffice it to say, dude was pretty amazing.