Credit: Alamy

Eminem was hospitalised in 2007 following a methadone overdose, with his manager, Paul Rosenberg, concerned that the rapper might have had brain damage. The Detroit native went five years between releasing Encore and Relapse; during this time, Em has admitted that he had to relearn how to rap from scratch.

Speaking to Rosenberg on the Paul Pod: Curtain Call 2 podcast in 2022, Em admitted, “It took a long time for my brain to start working again.” Rosenberg replied, “I mean, you literally were coming off of an overdose and they had to sort of stabilise you with a few medications. And some of them took you a minute to adjust to – let’s just leave it at that.”

He continued, “So you’re learning 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?” Em confirmed his statement before bringing up his brain damage concerns.

“Didn’t you ask the doctors — when I first started rapping again and sent it to you — didn’t you say like, ‘I just wanna make sure he doesn’t have brain damage,’” he said. Rosenberg responded, “I thought you might have some permanent problems. Yeah, I was concerned, for sure.”

The chart-topping Relapse album, released in 2009, didn’t find Eminem shying away from his troubles. In many of the songs, he rapped about his prescription pill addiction. Speaking to MTV in 2010, Eminem spoke more about the difficulty of learning to write and rap again while revealing that he also had to relearn how to drive a car.

“I had to learn to write and rap again, and I had to do it sober and 100 per cent clean,” he said. “That didn’t feel good at first … I mean it in the literal sense. I actually had to learn how to say my lyrics again; how to phrase them, make them flow, how to use force so they sounded like I meant them.”

He continued, “Rapping wasn’t like riding a bike. It was [as much] physical as mental. I was relearning basic motor skills. I couldn’t control my hand shakes. I’d get in the [recording] booth and tried to rap, and none of it was clever, none was witty and I wasn’t saying it right.”

Rosenberg claimed it only took Eminem five or six months to return to his creative self. But during the start of Relapse, Em was still in withdrawal and taking 75 to 80 valium pills a night. Em touched on how relieved he felt about making music again with that album.

“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,” he said. “It was the first album and the first time that I had fun recording in a long time. It was like the first time I started having fun with music again, and re-learning how to rap, you remember that whole process.”