ELTON JOHN: Hi, Marshall.
EMINEM: How are you doing, cunt?
JOHN: I’m very well, you old bastard. Are you in Detroit?
EMINEM: [laughs] Yeah.
JOHN: You must be pretty excited to have a new album coming out. Tell me about it.
EMINEM: I’ve been working on it for over a year. You know how it is—you make songs, and as you make the new ones, the old ones get old and you throw them out. The album is called Revival. It’s a reflection of where I’m at right now, but also I feel like what I tried to do was diversify. I’ve tried to make a little something for everyone.
JOHN: You’re very good on collaborations. We first met through the Grammys, when you asked me to do “Stan.” It was an amazing event for me that I’ll never forget.
EMINEM: I’ll never forget it either—and I was on drugs.
JOHN: You were on drugs?
EMINEM: Oh, I was for sure on drugs when we met.
JOHN: I couldn’t tell. I was just mesmerized by you and your performance; it made the hairs on the back of my arms stand up. It was like seeing Mick Jagger for the first time. I hadn’t really been exposed to that kind of rap in live performance before, and it was electrifying. And when that shit was thrown at you—about you being homophobic—I just thought, “I’m not standing for this. It’s nonsense.” I had to stand up and defend you. That Grammy performance was the start of a lovely friendship and I’m grateful for that.
EMINEM: Likewise. That was a crazy time for me. I don’t know if I was actually on drugs when we met, but that was right around the start of my using.
JOHN: You’ve been clean for a long time now.
EMINEM: Yeah, nine years.
JOHN: Your sobriety day is in my diary. I’m so proud of you. I’m 27 years clean, and when you get clean, you see things in a different way. It makes your life so much more manageable. It seems to have made all the difference—I can tell when I speak to you.
EMINEM: Getting clean made me grow up. I feel like all the years that I was using, I wasn’t growing as a person.
JOHN: Me, too. If I had to go through that to get where I am now, then I’m very, very grateful. But I just can’t believe I did some of that shit. Anyway, tell me about your life now. Every artist these days is on Instagram or Facebook, is taking selfies, is in the paper all the time, but you’re not like that. You live a pretty simple life. You’re not a lavish person. People think they know everything about you, but they really know nothing about you.
Read the full interview at Interview.
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