T-Pain Did A Live Set For NPR Without Autotune, And He’s Got An Incredible Singing Voice

T-Pain is to autotune what Mitt Romney is to hair gel; he uses a whooooooole lot of it. No-one complains when it blesses us with gifts from Heaven like the immortal ‘Buy U A Drank (Shawty Snappin’)’, but everyone just kind of assumes he uses autotune because he can’t sing, like pretty much everyone else does now.

Not so, bub. NPR talked him into doing a laid-back live set with nothing but a keyboard and his voice for company, and god damn does he have some pipes. I’m not exaggerating; he could reinvent himself as an old-style RnB crooner if he wanted to, and it’d be fantastic. Skip to twelve minutes in if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing; the vocal acrobatics he does are gorgeous.

Besides the weird cognitive dissonance that comes with hearing lyrics like “shawty what you thank ’bout that, I be in the grey Cadillac” sung in a genuinely beautiful voice, it’s also kind of great how nervous he is at the start, swinging on his chair all bashful and stuff. The video’s only just gone up, but I have a sneaky feeling it’s going to be everywhere in a very short space of time.

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H/t: Vulture.