AB: Are you angry at life right now?
Eminem: Honestly, I'm not really angry at anything right now. I'm OK with my life and what's going on right now. This is not really an emotionally driven album. There are a couple of songs, Beautiful being one of them, that touch on where I am emotionally, but it goes there without getting too dark. The overall theme of the record is to have a centre. 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.
AB: Are you saying that Encore falls short musically, lyrically or both?
Eminem: It feels a little too self-loathing to me. 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. That's what that record's overall theme feels like. Even Curtain Call feels like that was me then and I guess it was. That is where I was at then. AB: Are you at the point in your sobriety where you look back at those albums and trace how you were changing at all? Eminem: Oh definitely. Encore wasn't the start of my drug use but it was the start of the progression of my addiction. 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
Game-set-match...
