Eminem on His Near-Fatal Overdose: ‘It Took a Long Time for My Brain to Start Working Again’
Eminem is giving more information on his previous drug misuse difficulties.
The Grammy-winning rapper spoke candidly on a recent episode of Paul Rosenberg’s podcast about his nearly fatal overdose 15 years ago. Em previously disclosed that he had been struggling with prescription drug addiction and had been admitted to the hospital in 2007 after inadvertently overdosing on methadone.
“It took a long time for my brain to start working again,” Em said to his longtime manager.
“You literally were coming off of an overdose, and they had to sort of stabilize you with a few medications,” Rosenberg explained. “And some of them took you a minute to adjust to—let’s just leave it at that. 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?”
Rosenberg had previously expressed concern about the overdose’s long-term implications, Em recalled.
“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’?” Shady asked.
“Yeah. I thought you might have some permanent problems,” Rosenberg responded. “Yeah. I was concerned, for sure.”
The interview occurs more than a month after Em released Curtain Call 2, his greatest hits collection. The Marshall Mathers LP2, Recovery, and Relapse, which was Em’s first full-length release following his overdose, were among the 35-track project’s deletions. Relapse wasn’t the 49-year-best old’s work, he said because he was still working to reclaim his rapping abilities.
“Encore was mediocre, and with Relapse—it was the best I could do at that point in time,” he told Vulture in 2017. “[Relapse] was a funny album for me because I was just starting back rapping after coming out of addiction. I was so scatterbrained that the people around me thought that I might have given myself brain damage. I was in this weird fog for months. Like, literally I wasn’t making sense; it had been so long since I’d done vocals without a ton of Valium and Vicodin. I almost had to relearn how to rap.”
On Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET, Shade 45 on Sirus XM will air Part 1 of Eminem’s interview. Additionally, the Paul Pod episode will be accessible on the SXM App, Stitcher, and other popular podcasting websites.
