Five songs Eminem wrote about his children
Eminem, despite the wildness of his Slim Shady persona, often mellows out and wears his heart on sleeve in some of his music. His true emotions become especially evident when he raps about his children, which, over the decades, he’s done a lot of.
Eminem has three children, the most famous of whom is Hailie, his daughter with on-off partner Kim. Since she was a baby, right at the beginning of her dad’s career, Hailie has been Em’s muse, featuring in a load of his songs. Speaking about her to Q magazine in 2001, while she was still a young child, he said, “She made me get my ass in gear—to make something of my life and try 10 quadrillion times harder than I had before… Everything that I am doing right now is for Hailie.”
Em’s other two kids are not his biological children, but he has legally adopted them. The oldest, Alaina, he adopted during the 2000s, while her mother was struggling with addiction. Em has been a fixture of Alaina’s life from the day she was born, and he has mentioned her in several songs, too, often referring to her as Lainey. His other adopted child, Stevie, was born in 2002, during the period between Eminem and Kim’s two marriages. Stevie’s dad is another man that Kim was seeing at the time.
“My kids—I love them so much,” Eminem told The New York Times in 2010, “and they’ve helped me through so many things.” They’ve gotten him through some tough points in his life, and they’ve helped power so much of his music through the years, too. Here are five songs with Eminem’s children at their core.
Five songs Eminem wrote about his children:
5. ‘Somebody Save Me’
The last song on The Death of Slim Shady (Coup de Grâce), Eminem’s most recent album, the narrative of ‘Somebody Save Me’ takes place within an alternate universe in which Eminem never managed to kick his addiction to prescription drugs. His failure to beat the habit leads to his death before Hailie graduated, and the song, therefore, serves as a sort of apology from Eminem from beyond the grave.
The track opens with a recording of Lainey asking him to eat his dinner, which, because of his drug-induced state, he refuses to do. It’s a vivid, tragic look into the dynamic between a child and their parent, who, because of their addiction, can’t truly be there for them. The rest of the song sees Eminem to each of his three children in turn.
4. ‘Castle’
‘Castle,’ which appeared on Eminem’s ninth album Revival, was written for Hailie, with Em going right back to the start, describing a time before Hailie was even born. “You’ll be comin’ out of Mommy’s stomach soon,” he addresses his unborn daughter in the track. “I better do somethin’ quick if I’ma be able to support you.” He later jumps ahead to her childhood, reflecting, especially, on how his fame affected her as a kid. His guilt about what she had to go through is evident, and, ultimately, it contributes towards his descent into addiction, with the track ending with the sound of a pill bottle popping open.
Eminem explained more about the song’s background on his Shade 45 channel on Sirius XM Radio. “The ‘Castle’ song basically takes place in 2007, which leads to the overdose, which leads to Christmas and her birthday and me missing that because I was in the hospital,” he said. “Me not being there for my kids for Christmas was rough. And if you listen to ‘Castles’ all the way through, you hear me taking pills and falling; that was the re-creation of me falling in the bathroom and then waking up in the hospital and not knowing what the fuck was going on. I had tubes in me, I was angry and I couldn’t talk at all.”
3. ‘My Dad’s Gone Crazy’
Not only did Hailie help to inspire ‘My Dad’s Gone Crazy,’ which appears on The Eminem Show, but she also featured on it, too. As a child, she visited her dad in the studio while he was struggling to figure out a song. She was running around the place, and, at one point, she yelled out, “Somebody please help me! I think my dad’s gone crazy!” That sparked an idea for Em, and he decided that he needed Hailie herself to help him bring it to fruition.
“Instantly that locked in with a beat we’d made the day before,” he told Rolling Stone in 2004. “I went to my house, and I had her go in the booth and say it. When she opens up, she’s just like her dad in a lot of aspects. I just told her what to say and she nailed it, the first take. It almost was scary, to where I had to slow it down. I don’t know if I wanna put her on any more songs. I don’t wanna make her any more famous. She can live a life. She didn’t choose to have her father become a rap star.”
2. ‘Hailie’s Song’
Eminem never intended for the world to hear ‘Hailie’s Song.’ The plan had been to show it to her when she was grown up, but, once people around Em had listened to it, it became clear that it needed to feature on The Eminem Show. “I didn’t even plan to release it,” he told MTV in 2002. “I just wanted to experiment with it and have it for when she got older and play for her, like, ‘I made a song for you.’ And once it was finished, I started playing it for people, and people liked it.”
The song is notably tender, with Eminem even singing—which, in the intro, he openly worries about doing. The track expresses the pressures that Eminem feels in his life, particularly in relation to his disputes with Kim, with whom he was still having trouble at the time. But, ultimately, his stress melts away when he is with his young daughter, and the track celebrates that fact.
1. ‘Mockingbird’
Encore’s ‘Mockingbird’ was a big success for Eminem, earning him a Grammy nomination and clocking up more than a billion streams on Spotify, proving its enduring popularity two decades after its release. The track is something of a lullaby written for Hailie and Lainey, with the lyrics attempting to comfort his two young daughters and to make it clear that he loves them, even as fame and trouble with Kim disrupt all of their lives.
“When Mom was on the run they didn’t understand it,” Em explained in that 2004 Rolling Stone interview, “and I’m not the greatest talker in the world, especially when I’m trying to explain to two little girls what’s goin’ on with someone who’s always been a part of their life and just disappeared. So that was my song to explain to them what was goin’ on, probably the most emotional song I ever wrote.”