by DrunkenDeath » Aug 31st, '09, 02:41
This is what Eminem said about encore:
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. 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. Sedative drugs like Valium and Vicodin and Ambien, they certainly put a cloud over your head. They put a dumbbell in your mood. If something is bad in the first place, it's going to seem so much worse than it even is. A normal, thinking person would approach a tough situation in life like, "Wow! This is a really fucked-up time period that I'm experiencing right now but I'll get through it." My attitude was, "I'm never getting through with it. This is the most horrible shit." I was concerned with things like "I can't go to the fucking mall any more, I can't go to the gas station, I can't pump my own gas, how fucked up is that? I can't walk into a 7-11 store!" I couldn't do those things any more and all I did was sit and bitch and complain about it.
I'm that dude.
I want to talk shit, but i'll probably get banned for it from now on

fuckin' stalkers.