This will be relatively brief, as I apparently didn’t get enough sleep last night and at 7:05 I am entirely willing to go directly to bed the minute I finish this, but after seeing a TikTok video of T-Pain performing Ozzy Osbourne’s War Pigs live, the second I found out that there was a recording available of the entire concert I jumped at it. There is apparently also a cover album with a similar playlist that is studio versions, and I wasn’t aware it existed until searching for a .jpg of the album cover just now. I don’t really know a lot about T-Pain; I thought autotune was mostly his thing and while I’m sure I’ve heard him do a ton of guest appearances in other people’s songs I don’t think I could name anything by him if you paid me. But this album is bananas good; it’s eclectic as hell, running the gamut from Journey to the Guess Who to Marvin Gaye to Chris Stapleton to, again, Ozzy, and while I’ll admit that some of the bits where he’s just chatting with the audience are kind of annoying, this motherfucker can sing, and I listened to the album like three times straight yesterday.
This is one of the best kind of live albums, too– the crowd is tiny; he refers to “a hundred and some” people at one point, and I wouldn’t even necessarily have guessed that many, but you can hear every reaction from someone in the crowd and the recording itself is really clean. It’s occasionally a little too medley-style; I’d have appreciated more than a minute and eight seconds of Luther Vandross’ Never Too Much, for example, and that’s in the middle of about five or six great songs in a row, none of which get more than about a minute and a half. But he makes up for it with sheer charisma and energy, and there are worse complaints I could have had than I want more of this.
Don’t worry about whether you are a fan of T-Pain or not. Check out the set list (scroll down), and if you think you’ll enjoy the show, you’re probably right.
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