But the overdose scared him. Early last year he hospitalized himself, went through rehab and started the full 12-step program of a recovering addict, complete with meetings, a sponsor and a therapist. Mr. Mathers, 36, says he has stayed sober since April 20, 2008.
Far from concealing his addiction battle, he’s making it the center of his comeback. The cover of “Relapse” (Shady/Aftermath/Interscope), the first new Eminem album since 2004, builds his face out of pills, and in some songs he raps, as directly as a rhymer can, about how drugs nearly destroyed him. Elsewhere on the album Eminem resumes — or relapses into — his main alter ego, Slim Shady: the sneering, clownish, paranoid, homophobic, celebrity-stalking compulsive rapist and serial killer who plays his exploits for queasy laughs and mass popularity.
Eminem’s four previous major-label albums of new material — “The Slim Shady LP” in 1999, “The Marshall Mathers LP” in 2000, “The Eminem Show” in 2002 and “Encore” in 2004 — have sold about 30 million copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan. “Relapse” clings to the formula of its predecessors: it’s partly truth and partly fiction, with personal revelations and sociopathic farce side by side.
“It’s hard core, it’s dark comedy, it’s what Eminem has always been,” said Dr. Dre, his longtime producer, by telephone from his studio in the San Fernando Valley of Southern California. Eminem had been missed; the album’s first single, “Crack a Bottle” — with 50 Cent and Dr. Dre trading verses — went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 when it was released in February, selling 418,000 downloads in its first week.
“Relapse” is the latest episode in a soap-opera career that has always mingled confession, melodrama, comedy, horror, media baiting, craftsmanship and tabloid-scale hyperbole on every front.
“I don’t know if I’m exposing myself,” Mr. Mathers said by telephone from his studio in Detroit. “I’m kind of just coming clean and exhaling.”
He speaks amiably and coherently, without defensiveness, chatting with the zeal of a recovering addict about both his old excesses and his new clarity and productivity, sounding like someone relieved of a burden. “I was the worst kind of addict, a functioning addict,” he said. “I was so deep into my addiction at one point that I couldn’t picture myself being able to do anything without some kind of drug.”
He has been watching videos of himself onstage and in interviews from his drug days, including one from Black Entertainment Television that he said he has no memory of doing, when Ambien made him so befuddled he couldn’t even respond to simple questions. “I want to see what I looked like when I was on drugs, so I never go back to it,” he said.
In the five years between his own albums, he worked as a producer, making beats for other rappers, and occasionally showed up as a guest rapper; he now calls his verse on “Touch Down,” with the Atlanta rapper T.I., “horrible.”
But last year, just two months out of rehab, Eminem met Dr. Dre met in Orlando, Fla., to try recording. Eminem had been doing what he called “mind exercises” to get himself writing. “I’d stack a bunch of words and just go down the line and try to fill in the blanks and make sense out of them,” he said. “For three or four years I couldn’t do it any more.”
When he was sober, he said, “the wheels started turning again.” Working in Orlando and then in Detroit, Eminem and Dr. Dre recorded hundreds of tracks and finished enough new songs for three albums. They have culled them to two; Eminem plans to release “Relapse 2” before the end of this year. “The deeper I got into my addiction, the tighter the lid got on my creativity,” he said. “When I got sober the lid just came off. In seven months I accomplished more than I could accomplish in three or four years doing drugs.”
From the beginning Mr. Mathers has smeared the boundary between Eminem and Slim Shady. In “97 Bonnie & Clyde” from the 1999 “Slim Shady LP,” the rapper takes along his gurgly baby daughter — named Hailie, like Mr. Mathers’s real daughter (who lives with him in Detroit) — while disposing of her mother’s murdered corpse. The new album traces Eminem’s addictive tendencies to one of his earliest and most frequent targets: “My Mom,” who, the song says, used to mix Valium into his food to make him manageable.
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