T.I.’s new track “Stay” hit the Web this past week, and with so much speculation about the status of him and his wife Tiny’s marriage, a song called “Stay” drew a lot of attention from fans. Speaking with Houston’s Devi Dev and Mr. Rogers, T.I. addressed speculation that the song is personal and said that he didn’t even intend for the song to get out.
“Actually I didn’t drop the record,” Tip said. “It leaked. I did a program with Samsung and they asked for one exclusive record off the album before the album. So we gave them that and some kind of way, I think we were expecting for it to remain with Samsung consumers, some kind of way, someone was dishonest. It leaked. I think it’s for the best. As long as the people who wanna hear it get to hear it.”
“As much as I guess people would like to associate it with things that are personal to me, the way that it makes better sense in my mind is if I kind of remove myself from it and just listen to the record and imagine as though I was creating a fictional set of circumstances sprinkled with some reality in it. I guess it’s easier for me to conceptualize it that way. That way it don’t feel like people in my business.”
The rapper said fans have become very comfortable with thinking that they know his personal business and offer too much commentary via social media.
“The more people see you, hear you, and I guess feel the more personable that you are, the more they invite themselves to your circumstances,” he said. “[They] offer unwelcomed opinions. I think it comes with the territory … Within the [safety] of behind their keyboard. It’s not like in person or nothing.”
Last week, Tiny also released a song. Her track was called “What the F— You Gon’ Do?” and it also fueled widespread speculation that the reality star was airing out her marriage troubles in song. But she told MTV that she wrote this particular track a year ago and that some people seem to have forgotten that she had an established R&B career in the 1990s.
“I get it, especially with young people who might not know Xscape or who know T.I. and his music and see me as just his wife,” Tiny explained. “But I’m not just his wife. I’m a singer. I have been for a long time. And it’s a very big part of who I am. I missed being in the studio at first. But with [her daughter’s teen group] the OMG Girlz, I got a chance to write and produce, and that was how I stayed connected to music.”
“My new song is a statement,” Tiny also shared. “Some people might say, ‘Why put your business in a song?’ It’s because this is my life and my truth and this is how I choose to express it. Isn’t that what we do as entertainers? We go through stuff and we write about it. I wrote this song a year ago. I never planned to put it out. It was therapy for me. At the time, I was really going through a lot. Stuff that the public didn’t know and still doesn’t know. And over the past year, as things have unfolded publicly, people expected me to speak on it. And then I realized, I did speak on all of this, a year ago, in this song. So it made sense to release it.”
