Paul Rosenberg recently debuted a new podcast, aptly titled Paul Pod: Curtain Call 2, where the legendary manager sits down with familiar faces from through out Eminem’s career. The podcast launched with an interview with Steve Berman, the Vice Chairman of Interscope Records, and has since featured Royce Da 5’9″, Skylar Gray and more.
Last night’s episode was long-awaited, as Eminem graced Sirius XM’s Shade45 to offer a bit of a retrospective on the past 10 years of his career. This is only part one, with a second part to follow likely next week.
In their 48-minute conversation, Paul and Eminem walks fans through the process of relapse all the way to meeting Rick Rubin and working on MMLP 2. They touch on the biggest pain points for these projects, and give fans a bit of backstory. Among them, Rosenberg has Eminem address his prevalent use of accents through out relapse. While still considered to be a low-key fan favorite album, the project did garner criticism at the time for Eminem’s frequent use of strange accents– although the rapper had adopted accents before, there were some here that were more or less unidentifiable — as Eminem says during their conversation, he’s sure if the accents were Irish or German or something else entirely. Despite how Eminem may feel about relapseit did offer fans some of now-cult classics such as “Deja Vu” and the equally horror-esque “3 AM.”
When Paul and Em dive into the use of accents, Eminem reveals that it sort of snowballed over time, “The accents, they built up. They started getting thicker and thicker. And I don’t even know what f*cking accents they are . It’s like f*cking Irish, German…” He continues later, “I don’t have a problem with some of the rhymes and some of the verses as far as lyrically, it’s just that the accents…I felt like I sounded so demented in that shit, that I got cemented in that shit, and then I bented back bitch. And then I went to scratch itch.” Paul offered in response, “You felt like you were stuck in it and you went way too heavy on the accents.”
What’s perhaps most interesting here, is that the two basically say that Relapse 2 never came to fruition because Eminem was fed up with the accents.
Paul says to Em, “You were going to make it a double album, you had enough songs, you thought, to make a Relapse 2. And at some point, you decided not to do that, and I think it was at the point where you said, enough with this accent stuff. But what we did was we put a bunch of those songs out as Relapse Refill. And then some songs leaked out. But that was it.” He continues, in an effort to shut down persistent rumors: “A lot of your fans think there’s some hidden Relapse 2 album.”
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However Eminem doesn’t let it go so easily, responding, “I mean, there’s probably enough to make another relapse album but…” When Paul pushes back saying that all the songs that would have been on Relapse 2 leaked, Eminem reveals, “there are a lot of songs that did not leak out from relapse.”, however, before we get our hopes up, Eminem adds, “But they are terrible songs. And if they didn’t make relapseand I feel how I feel about relapsethen that should say something.” Finally, Eminem concludes, “There is no Relapse 2.” So there we have it. If you want to read a complete history about Relapse 2head here.
Listen to the full podcast interview below, and stay tuned for part two.
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