Why Did It Take So Long for Us to Get the T-Wayne Album?

On Thursday, T-Pain surprised the world by leaking his long-delayed collaborative project with Lil Wayne. According to the rappa-ternt-sanga, the songs are from 2009.

As you can tell from the tweet above, T-Pain released the tracks at least in part in solidarity with Wayne’s complicated legal situation surrounding Birdman, Cash Money, and the rapper’s often-delayed album Tha Carter V, which has been on the verge of being released for almost the past five years.

But why haven’t we had access to this music until now? Why were those songs just taking up space on a hard drive for years? To figure that out, we have to go back to the beginning of the story.

In 2008, when the project was first publicly discussed, Wayne was at the tail end of a run as “the best rapper alive” that started with the 2005 release of Tha Carter II. He demolished nearly every verse during that period—and there were a lot of them! To give you an idea of his pace and quality at the time, Vibe did a list of his 77 best songs of 2007, and they had to leave a lot of great ones out. Wayne gained widespread recognition for his artistry, far outside of normal hip-hop circles. 

One other thing that occurred during this period was that Weezy had a lot of collaborative projects in the works. At different points, he either released or discussed duo albums with Birdman, Juelz Santana, Lloyd, and T-Pain. Out of that list, only Birdman’s came to fruition. In the intervening years, Juelz has blamed meddling record labels for holding up I Can’t Feel My Face. 

As for T-Pain, the story is slightly more complicated. The project, as noted, was first mentioned in the press in mid-2008, when Wayne confirmed already-existing rumors that he and T-Pain were forming a group. They even wore shirts showing how serious they were, and the album was supposed to be released in the fall. 

Almost immediately, though, recording proved to be slow going. Between that and the fact that Cash Money was reluctant to release a project so soon after the stratospheric success of Wayne’s Tha Carter III, all of a sudden it was a year later and comparatively little progress had been made.

Not long afterwards, a 2007 arrest for gun possession caught up with Weezy, and he began a drawn-out court process that ended in March 2010, when he was sentenced to a year in prison. At that point, the plan was to wait until he was released and he finished promoting his Rebirth album, which was released just before he was sentenced. 

“We’re going to wait until he gets out,” T-Pain told MTV right after Wayne’s sentencing. “Right now, it’s time for him and his personal shit.”

But when Wayne got out at the tail end of 2010, he had other priorities, like promising a never-released joint album with Drake, and T-Wayne seemed relegated to the ash heap of history.

Yet in 2015, long after many fans had abandoned hope, T-Pain was still attempting to finish up the project. But by then, Wayne’s legal issues with Cash Money were going strong, adding yet another layer of complication.

“Every time I try to do the T-Wayne album something’s going on with Wayne,” T-Pain told AllHipHop. “Right now I don’t think it’s a good time. We send songs back and forth, but he really doesn’t want to release anything cause of his [contract] situation.”

That brings us up to today, when solidarity and the need to free up extra hard drive space leads us to hear the long-awaited album. Now, someone needs to reach out to Juelz Santana, so I Can’t Feel My Face can be freed next…