


When he was sober, he said, “the wheels started turning again.” Working in Orlando and then in Detroit, Eminem and Dr. “For three or four years I couldn’t do it any more.” “I’d stack a bunch of words and just go down the line and try to fill in the blanks and make sense out of them,” he said. Eminem had been doing what he called “mind exercises” to get himself writing. Dre met in Orlando, Fla., to try recording. In the five years between his own albums, he worked as a producer, making beats for other rappers, and occasionally showed up as a guest rapper he now calls his verse on “Touch Down,” with the Atlanta rapper T.I., “horrible.”īut last year, just two months out of rehab, Eminem met Dr. “I want to see what I looked like when I was on drugs, so I never go back to it,” he said. He has been watching videos of himself onstage and in interviews from his drug days, including one from Black Entertainment Television that he said he has no memory of doing, when Ambien made him so befuddled he couldn’t even respond to simple questions. “Relapse” clings to the formula of its predecessors: it’s partly truth and partly fiction, with personal revelations and sociopathic farce side by side.
#Eminem recovery album cover clean serial
Elsewhere on the album Eminem resumes or relapses into his main alter ego, Slim Shady: the sneering, clownish, paranoid, homophobic, celebrity-stalking compulsive rapist and serial killer who plays his exploits for queasy laughs and mass popularity.Įminem’s four previous major-label albums of new material “The Slim Shady LP” in 1999, “The Marshall Mathers LP” in 2000, “The Eminem Show” in 2002 and “Encore” in 2004 have sold about 30 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The cover of “Relapse” (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope), the first new Eminem album since 2004, builds his face out of pills, and in some songs he raps, as directly as a rhymer can, about how drugs nearly destroyed him. Mathers, 36, says he has stayed sober since April 20, 2008.įar from concealing his addiction battle, he’s making it the center of his comeback.
#Eminem recovery album cover clean full
Early last year he hospitalized himself, went through rehab and started the full 12-step program of a recovering addict, complete with meetings, a sponsor and a therapist. Mathers had ramped up his habit again.īut the overdose scared him. Public statements covered up the reason for his emergency hospitalization and detox, claiming the problem was pneumonia. IN late December 2007 a depressed, writer’s-blocked, pill-popping, opiate-addicted Marshall Mathers, better known as the multimilllion-selling rapper Eminem, overdosed on some new blue pills someone gave him they were methadone and collapsed on his bathroom floor.
