Relapse Tracklist
Relapse is Eminem’s 6th studio album released May 15, 2009.
The album was released 4 years after his last studio album Encore. The reason there had been such a long gap between the 2 albums is that after Encore, Eminem got heavily more addicted to drugs and ended up overdosing and almost dying in 2007, which made him decide to go to drug rehab for his addiction to sleeping pills. This was also at the same time he started writing the most successful song in the album, “Beautiful”. It is also the reason why the album cover is a mosaic of Eminem made of different pills and why the album is titled Relapse.
The album didn’t sell as well as his other albums, but it did reach double platinum status.
The album got mixed reviews by music critics and by the fans because of its horror-core themes and especially because of Em’s heavy use of accents to make impossible rhymes; however, it did get Eminem a Grammy Award for Best Rap Album and reached #1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Eminem had admitted that he thought this album wasn’t that good both on interviews and in songs like “Talkin' 2 Myself”.
His next album Recovery was originally meant to be called “Relapse 2” and essentially serve as a continuation but Eminem changed the name claiming the album had completely different material, and it didn’t make sense to call it a sequel. Although in Recovery itself, it was noticeable some horror-core influences from the original “Relapse 2” did slip in on tracks like “On Fire”.
“Relapse” Q&A
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Translations
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What has Eminem said about the album?
In his interview for the June 2009 issue of Vibe, Eminem explained:
With this album, the concept of relapse was obviously a double entendre. As in, literally relapsing on drugs and also relapsing back into Shady. I heard a lot of comments when I was away. A lot of people said, “When Em comes back he’s gotta reinvent himself.” I didn’t feel like I needed to reinvent myself. I feel like I needed to just go back to what got me here in the first place: just rapping about the craziest, most outlandish shit. […] Relapse is the return of Slim Shady. A return to rapping and doing what I do, instead of worrying about what everyone’s gonna say when it comes out.
