Eminem has been on a sobriety journey for over a decade now. The Lose Yourself rapper once opened up about his journey to sobriety and what prompted him to this path.
During his appearance on Paul Rosenberg’s Paul Pod podcast, who was also his longtime manager, the rapper recalled his recovery from the overdose, which he and the host agreed he almost did not survive. Eminem reflected on his near-fatal drug overdose in 2007, which was a wake-up call for and inspired him to get sober.
Eminem has been sober since 2008, and in the early days of his recovery, he made his 2009 album Relapse. In the interview, the rapper shared that returning to music made him feel things were “new to me again. He added, “I remember when I first got sober and all the s— was out of my system, I remember just being, like, really happy, and everything was f—g new to me again. It was the first album and the first time I had fun recording in a long time.”
The rapper continued, “It was like the first time I started having fun with music again, and re-learning how to rap, you remember that whole process. It took a long time for my brain to start working again.”
During the interview, he also recalled Rosenberg asking the doctors if the rapper might have suffered permanent brain damage as he learned to make music and rap sober for the first time in years following his overdose. Eminem asked, “Didn’t you ask the doctors when I started recording news—when I first started rapping again and sent it to you, didn’t you say, ‘I just wanted to make sure he didn’t have brain damage?’”
To this, Rosenberg quipped that he was concerned about whether Eminem would have “permanent problems” during his recovery. The duo also cited an unreleased song called Detroit Basketball, which leaked at the time, as an example of the kind of work Eminem produced immediately after his recovery, which created some cause for concern. Rosenberg admitted, “Nobody was pushing you; you were just finding your way and doing it slowly, but a record that leaked out, that ‘Detroit Basketball’ record, it wasn’t good,”
Eminem responded, agreeing with the host: “It was weird because as my brain was turning back on, I started going over lines like ‘Wait, that’s not good.’ If you remember, I don’t know which version leaked, but if you remember, there were 20 versions of that s—.”
He also recalled the time when he was recording in Florida and was in withdrawal after his overdose and admitted that he took “75-80 valium a night”, at the time when he started working on Relapse.
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