Credit: Alamy

Eminem experienced the highs and lows of celebrity life in the 2000s. On one hand, he became a star with albums like The Marshall Mathers LP, The Eminem Show, and Encore. On the other hand, he was struggling with a drug addiction, taking painkillers and sleeping pills to feel normal. Around this time, he released a project he wasn’t content with.

Encore, released in 2004, included some of his career’s biggest singles, including ‘Just Lose It’, ‘Like Toy Soldiers’, ‘Mockingbird‘, and ‘Ass Like That’. Following the release of Relapse in 2009, Em revealed that the album wasn’t emotionally driven, mostly avoiding getting too dark. On the flip side, he admitted his previous project included too many strong feelings of dislike for himself.

“The overall theme of the record is to have a centre,” he told The Guardian. “I feel like I lost that on my last albums. Encore is a good record, but I don’t feel like it was a great record for me. It wasn’t quite up to what I feel like my personal standards are for myself. It wasn’t all that I’m capable of doing.

“It feels a little too self-loathing to me,” he continued. “When I go back and listen to it, it just feels like I’m pissing and moaning about whatever. It sounds like in my head I feel like I have all these things to piss and moan about. And maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, I don’t know, but to actually bring that kind of shit to the forefront like that, I just don’t agree with it. I guess to me now it feels like I beat up the subject of what was me.”

Encore reached number one on the Billboard 200 chart with 710,000 copies sold in its first week. The Grammy-nominated album has been certified 11 times platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America, acknowledging 11 million copies sold.

Eminem was taking Valium, Vicodin, and Ambien to get through his day. Although he was using drugs long before Encore, things were taken up a notch with that album. Em knew it was breaking him down, but he tried to mask the pain. He can even pinpoint certain songs that were recorded as a result of particular drugs.

“Encore wasn’t the start of my drug use but it was the start of the progression of my addiction,” he explained. “It really went to the next level between The Eminem Show and Encore – that’s when it started progressing from recreation to a real problem. Even though I knew it inside, I would never let on that it was a problem.

“Obviously I was pretty good at hiding it because I was pretty busy. I was a functioning addict. I knew in my mind, ‘I’m taking these pills just for the fuck of it now.’ I was taking them and I needed more and more. When I think back on my mental state back then – ‘Oh, I wrote this because of this’ – I can see what I was going through.”