If all that bought was the final 20 seconds of "Wherever", he should consider it money well spent. Ty said he spent $60,000 of his own money on the Benjamin Wright Orchestra. Over dirty 808s and a stirring chord progression, his pristine voice pops out of the ether singing about-what else?-lying with a woman in the, uh, biblical sense. But what's truly special is Ty's porcelain, Prince-like falsetto. After putting God first and damning the haters with the conviction of a newly born-again Christian, he begins to pray. On its dazzling highlight, "Miracle/Wherever", TC, the album's incarcerated namesake and Ty's younger brother, sings a vibrato-heavy hymn of perseverance over a prison phone.
He's stoked about sweeping orchestrations, '80s smooth jazz sax solos, and acoustic songs with Babyface. His confidence is why he flies when he swings for the fences on his new album, Free TC.
His molasses-dipped voice never misses a note even when it darts up into falsetto. To be sure, it helps that his musical gifts are many: he writes hooks that lodge in your head for weeks and he arranges four-part harmonies like an R&B George Martin. Ty has honed this musically refined yet lyrically raunchy aesthetic for years, from his Raw & Bangin*'* tapes to his breakout single "My Cabana", to the louche Beach House series to last month's made-in-a-day Airplane Mode. It's a balancing act very few have mastered-and Ty bows to or has recruited anyone who has here-but he does it on a hoverboard while texting two or 10 girls.
On the track, an orchestral sample dances under the near-onomatopoeic effect of Ty's "up and down, up and down, up and down-down-down" chant.
There is a song on Ty Dolla $ign's first mixtape, Hou$e on the Hill, that wouldn't be out of place in a Los Angeles Philharmonic pops concert.