I don’t write, so it’s not like there’s a beat happening and I’m sitting there jotting lyrics down.

The second part is just complete boredom. My manager will walk in every now and again just to make sure I’m making music and not on Reddit or something. First, there’s the amazement that there’s nobody else in the studio. There are two stages of being in the studio with T-Pain. What’s the creative evolution been like for your new record? I think people got too comfortable with me: “You’ve done a lot of those smash records it’s not a surprise anymore.” But now that the whole Auto-Tune aspect has gone away, it’s a whole different ballgame. Then someone else comes along and does it, and now it’s the best shit in the world. I did shit two years before it got cool, and nobody thought it was good. It’s only now that I understand what being ahead of your time means. It showed me that I just needed to trust myself again. It re-animated me and got me out of the depression. Let me spend my own money to get back out there.” I paid for the “Up Down” video and edited it too.

By 2013, I was like, “Let me go back and make my own decisions. I couldn’t sleep because I’d hear the same song over and over. I stayed making music but didn’t want to release anything. Like, “What the fuck is wrong?” Jive shut down, and they shipped everybody to RCA, which hit me off guard. Then it kept going further down, which made me more depressed. I was so worried about being wrong that I let the label do everything because I didn’t want to spend my money. Now we’re going to take over.” That’s when shit started to go downhill. When I released “Take Your Shirt Off,” and that didn’t do well, the label was like, “You were wrong this time. I had stopped making decisions for myself. The industry turned it from a passion into a job. In 2010, I said, “Fuck it, I don’t care if people like this.” I didn’t care if people didn’t know about the album.

Why was tpain at pokis house