Eminem takes to lyric website Genius to discuss his songs

Shady Records, the record label that Eminem and his manager Paul Rosenberg founded, celebrated its fifteen year anniversary towards the end of last year with a double album of greatest hits and new material and maybe that got Eminem feeling all nostalgic.

Following in the e-footsteps of Rick Rubin and Fall Out Boy, Eminem has annotated a selection of his discography with little insights and stories surrounding some of his biggest hits.

Eminem on ‘My Name Is’

“‘My Name Is’ was the first song we recorded. We recorded three or four that day, in like six hours. One song was called ‘Ghost Stories’ and one was ‘When Hell Freezes Over.’ I feel like there was one more but I can’t remember what it was. We always have this discussion, because Dre says it’s four.

Paul used to live in New Jersey, right across from Manhattan. He had an apartment he shared with three roommates. I was over, sleeping on the couch. We didn’t have money yet, really. We had already filmed the video, and we saw it for the first time on MTV. It came on really late at night. I was sleeping on the couch when Paul saw it for the first time.

That’s when it was like, ‘Okay, this isn’t a joke anymore.’ We had kind of felt that, being in the studio with Dre and shit. But once that single came out, my life changed like that. Within a day. Just going outside. I couldn’t go outside anymore. In a day. It went from the day before, doing whatever the fuck I wanted to do, because nobody knew who the fuck I was, to holy shit, people are fucking following us. It was crazy. That’s when shit just got really — it was a lot to deal with at once.

Right after the first single came out, I did a signing at the Virgin Megastore in Times Square. While I was there, I got served by a court processor. They knew where I’d be, and they had to physically serve me. The guy got tackled. He was stupid. You don’t need to physically serve someone anymore, like in the movies. But the guy was being a cowboy. It was some lawsuit from my mother, I think.”

Eminem on ‘Lose Yourself’

“Maybe people are just thinking father rhymes with daughter or something. But it’s about repeating a pattern. The trick is to get the pattern to hit on the same beat — ‘grown farther,’ ‘own daughter,’ the ‘knows’ and ‘goes,’ like that.”

Eminem on ‘Stan’

“When I heard ‘your picture on my wall,’ I was like ‘Yo, this could be about somebody who takes me too seriously.’ So I knew what I was going to write about before I wrote it. A lot of times when I’m writing songs, I see visions for everything I’m writing. This was one of those.

I remember Mark The 45 King sent me that beat. And when I first heard it, I was like, ‘Holy shit.’ But I didn’t know it was going to be so big. When I was writing it, I just thought, “Whoa, people are going to get sick of this because it goes on for so long.”

You can read all of the annotations here