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T-Wayne Lives: T-Pain And Lil Wayne's Collaborative Album Released After A Decade

T-Pain and Lil Wayne are <em>T-Wayne.</em>
Courtesy of the artist
T-Pain and Lil Wayne are T-Wayne.

T-Pain just unleashed a real rap unicorn. T-Wayne — his once-promised collaborative project with Lil Wayne, originally set to drop around 2009 — is finally live on Soundcloud. Also available for free download on the artists' shared website, it's a nostalgic rewind to an era when both T-Pain and Lil Wayne were at the apex of their careers.

In the history of lost and long-mythologized hip-hop albums, the T-Wayne project falls somewhere between Dr. Dre's years-in-the-making Detox (which he finally killed for good with the release of Compton in 2015) and a rumored-but-unconfirmed collaboration between Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole.

Featuring a host of producers, the eight-track project includes a familiar-sounding beat from Bangladesh, the producer whose past work on "A Milli" made it one of Wayne's most successful singles.

T-Wayne comes at an interesting time for T-Pain and Lil Wayne. Wayne's career remains in legal limbo thanks to his drawn-out dispute with Cash Money Records. Meanwhile, T-Pain has been in comeback mode, releasing new music and remixes at a steady clip in recent months (and playing a 2014 Tiny Desk concert that's been viewed on YouTube more than 10 million times).

But for the moment, T-Wayne finds the duo partying like it's 2009.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Rodney Carmichael is NPR Music's hip-hop staff writer. An Atlanta-bred cultural critic, he helped document the city's rise as rap's reigning capital for a decade while serving on staff as music editor, culture writer and senior writer for the defunct alt-weekly Creative Loafing.