Did you know that Eminem recorded an ever more lethal third verse of “Stan,” but a high-as-a-kite engineer ruined the epic and emotional last part of the joint. Slim Shady provided a lengthy annotation for Genius, and recounted how his iconic song could have been even better.
“This particular engineer I had never worked with before,” Eminem said. “While we were recording the third verse of ‘Stan,’ he started rolling a joint and asked me if I minded if he smoked while we cut. What was I gonna do? Say no? He was already rolling it so I told him ‘No problem.'”
That permission to get blazed would come back to haunt Em.
“I had gotten all the way to the last 3 lines and I screwed up so all he had to do was punch in my vocals at the end so I could re-do that line and the verse was finished,” Em explained. “So I’m in the booth waiting and he backs the tape up all the way to the beginning of the verse and punches me in. I realize he’s in the wrong spot and I can’t hear any of my vocals so I start waving my arms and yelling in the mic to try to get his attention. He doesn’t notice so I run into the control room through a cloud of smoke and yell ‘Yo, I wanted to keep those vocals’ he just looked at me and said ‘My bad man…you wanna hit this?'”
The verse where Stan is at his breaking point and there is so much emotion was lost forever.
“I re-recorded it but you should have heard the original take that shit was WAY better…oh well!”
One of the most explosive verses on one of Eminem’s greatest songs could have been even better if it weren’t for a stoned engineer accidentally recording over his amazing take.
[Uproxx]
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