Though T-Pain was initially hesitant to adopt a sound he correctly assumed was a fad, snap music clearly suited his style—a sugary, Auto-Tune-drenched trill that sounded like Megatron singing freakishly sweet love songs. Again, on the album’s second single, “Bartender,” synths gleaming like starlight, he recounts a night out with the brevity of a blues singer, parroting his own lines: “Broke up with my girl last night/So I went to the club.” So flawlessly does Akon harmonize with T-Pain on the hook that it’s easy to forget he sings the third verse (many DJs likely cut the song off before then), playing a sober wingman requesting T-Pain’s permission to bounce with a new friend.
In singing about the euphoria and delirium of nightlife, T-Pain nods to his Tallahassee roots on the early album cut “Church,” a countrified fight song filled with banjos and handclaps, and “Show U How,” which feels like the soundtrack to a rodeo or praise dance. He deploys his rap alter ego, Teddy Penderazdoun, to pursue the scarlet-letter woman in town, playing off the ho-into-a-housewife trope, annoyingly. But it’s also… sweet? “Tell ’em kiss yo ass/’Cause at the end of the day, you got a place to/Lay down and let me lay with you,” he sings. All part of his life’s work. His rap personas (the other one on the album is Teddy Verseti) exist mainly to show his versatility, and he is entertaining and often dexterous as a lyricist but much better at bellowing sweet nothings than tough talk.
The party vibe in T-Pain’s music is sometimes thick to the point of overshadowing the fun. The darker side of his debauchery is “Tipsy,” where the mood feels coercive, to say the least: “I knew you wouldn’t be the freak that you are unless you tipsy,” he sings (in a Juvenile-esque lower register), proving that the booze-and-a-good-time objective has an outer limit. As T-Pain explains it, though, he celebrates a lot because drinking and merriment feel genuinely restorative, and that’s the way of the South. “I think people relate to my songs more because I’m not trying to be overly clever. It’s kinda just normal conversation,” he told NPR in 2014. “It’s just, ‘Listen. Here’s the situation. Here’s a melody to it. You like it? You don’t? Here it is.’”
Epiphany is full of odd surprises. “Time Machine” is a delightfully weird sci-fi ballad in which T-Pain portrays a robot named Tebunon Pedalophagis from Planet Teleguston, singing like a sad Iron Giant about returning to simpler times before his career took off: “Illudium PU-36 explosive space modulator/Goin’ on a trip, I’ll be back/Homeboy, I’ll see you later,” he laments, allowing himself to dream, Auto-Tune on the zero-est setting. (Planet Teleguston begs for a visual treatment.) The track is, of course, quickly followed by a sensual homage to Pilates-toned abs, “Yo Stomach,” the kind of absurd T-Pain song you can probably hear before actually listening to it. There, and on pleasure-seeking records like “69” (no guessing what that’s about) and “Put It Down,” his vocal texture is both smooth and gritty, like a pitcher of lemonade with sugar grains at the bottom.
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