Eminem Had to Relearn How to Rap Following Drug Overdose

Eminem revisited his 2007 accidental overdose on methadone while appearing on the latest episode of his longtime manager Paul Rosenberg’s podcast Paul Pod, opening up about the process of “relearning how to rap.”

“I remember when I first got sober and all the shit was out of my system, I remember just being, like, really happy and everything was fucking new to me again,” Em recalled about working on his 2009 comeback album Relapse. “It was the first album and the first one that I had fun recording in a long time.”

However, the Detroit MC first had to retrain himself in his longtime craft. “It was like the first time I started having fun with music again and relearning how to rap,” he said. “You remember that whole process, [it] took a long time for my brain to start working again.”

Rosenberg remembered that doctors had to “stabilize” Em with “a few medications” following the overdose, which required some adjustment on the rapper’s part. “So, you’re learning how to rap again almost literally, right? Because it’s the first time, probably, you were creating without having substances in your body in, however many years, right? So it’s a whole different experience.”

Em then brought up Rosenberg’s concerns about his well-being after hearing his first music since the overdose, saying, “Didn’t you ask the doctors when I first started rapping again, didn’t you say, ‘I just wanna make sure he doesn’t have brain damage’?”

“Yeah. I thought you might have some permanent problems,” Rosenberg responded. “Yeah. I was concerned, for sure.”

This was just the latest time Em has spoken about his struggles with returning to form after the overdose. In a 2009 interview with The New York Times, Em said he would “stack a bunch of words and just go down the line and try to fill in the blanks and make sense out of them” while relearning how to rap. More recently, he told Vulture in 2017 that he was “so scatterbrained that the people around me thought that I might have given myself brain damage” and his rhymes “literally” weren’t “making sense.”

Last month, Em released his second greatest hits album, Curtain Call 2, featuring 35 tracks from The Marshall Mathers LP2, Recovery, and Relapse. During an appearance at the 2022 MTV VMAs, he teamed up with Snoop Dogg for a metaverse performance of “From the D 2 the LBC,” which he previously dropped in June.

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