With 60 hit songs under his belt and two Grammy trophies on his mantle, T-Pain has cemented himself as one of the most influential artists of all time. But even he needed a bit of time to himself to reload. After an eight year run of #1 hits, albums, tours and a plethora of cameo appearances, T-Pain found himself living a life full of exactly what his name implies.

Upon releasing his 2011 album rEVOLVEr, the “Rappa Ternt Sanga” took an abrupt, but well-deserved, break from the spotlight. but it wasn’t to enjoy his spoils. His non-stop lifestyle was beginning to take a toll on his personal life and it was beginning to affect his creative. He stated, “I was becoming somebody that I didn’t like. I was living an unhappy lifestyle, and it started affecting my family. I was hurting and scaring a lot of people.” At the height of his career that included a popular smartphone app and a Super-Bowl commercial, T-Pain decided to take a two-year hiatus from releasing music. Where that would be a death sentence for other artists, it wound up leading to a second birth for T-Pain. In the fall of 2013, a rejuvenated T-Pain returned with one of his biggest hits to date, the DJ Mustard-produced single, “Up Down (We Do This All Day)” featuring B.o.B. After returning to his familiar spot in the top ten of the charts for 28 straight weeks and counting, he continued the comeback in 2014 with the club smash “Drankin Patna.”

His fifth album, “Stoicville: The Phoenix” is scheduled to follow, and T-Pain promises that he’s back to being the artist he originally intended to be: “I want to be able to say that I put out an album that I believed in and that I liked. Every song on the album is something that came out of my heart.” With this refreshed spirit, T-Pain is now spanning the globe on his “I Am T-Pain” tour with dates selling out in the United States, Europe, Australia and all points in between. Where fans will surely recognize the music and appreciate the new energy, they will also see the external changes T-Pain has made as well. He’s lost much of the weight he put on during his down time and he even shaved off his trademarked dreadlocks. “That was one of the hardest things to change about me,” he admits. “but I figured that if I could make that big of a change, everything else would change immediately, and it did.”

With many artists in the marketplace building successful careers borrowing from a sound that T-Pain helped create, it’s only right that he return to claim his throne. Only this time, don’t expect him to take another break; he’s going as hard as ever.