G Life: Dinner With Tank (The R&B Singer)

I attended a nice dinner with R&B singer/songwriter Tank along with a few other journos and bloggers a couple of weeks ago, at a Chinese Restaurant called Chin Chin. We dined on good Chinese, as in, there was no General Tso’s or chicken wings and pork fried rice on the menu lol, and we chatted with Tank as we listened to some of his music, old and new.

Tank is promoting is new album, Now or Never, which drops on September 21. We only heard snippets of the new stuff and our chatter was raucous so it was hard to pay attention but what I did manage to hear was good. The main point of this dinner was for Tank to get to know the media because although he has done some interviews here and there, people still don’t really know who he is.

Weeks prior to the dinner I interviewed him for VIBE but I didn’t know him beyond “Maybe I Deserve” and “Slowly.”

Tank doing this dinner was a great idea (shouts to 135th Street Agency) because one thing a lot of artists don’t realize is that personality goes a long way. It’s sad to say this but from my experiences with actors vs musicians (we’ll toss rappers in the musician category too), musicians, a lot more than actors, lose on the personality front because despite their music, they come across as vapid (not all but a good amount). Tank, however, speaks Spanish fluently, he’s very worldly, loves to travel and explore new cultures and again, is also a songwriter so he knows how to make money behind the scenes, which is more important these days. I also tested his talent by making him improvise songs based on random phrases I threw out like “water lilies,” “mellow yellow,” etc. This wasn’t the type of dinner where I would flip cam that stuff lol but he passed the talent and personality test.  It sucks that I assumed the negative at first but like I said, my experiences have taught me to go with the negative thoughts first.

Tank definitely proved me wrong.

Tags: Tank

Category: Music, Reflections