Discussing stories behind hip-hop tracks during the interview, Sway Calloway pitched the idea of making the interview with Eminem where he would talk about his famous songs. Marshall was down to this and even shared one of these stories right on the spot.
The one that jumped on his mind was the story about “The Way I Am” that was released as the second single from “Marshall Mathers LP”:
I remember being on a plane. I got on a plane and I was thinking, this flow in my head and then all of a sudden the piano started coming to me. I just kept repeating the melody so I didn’t forget it. I kind of wrote the song on the plane and then had to make the beat afterwards. I had to ask Dre how to do it because at that point in time I was still learning how to produce, so I needed to make the idea come to life. I was actually on the way out to LA at that time to record with Dre, so that was one of the things that I brought to him and I was telling him the idea. So we just had to keep the keyboard player to play a melody and then he had a bunch of drum sounds on his drum machine and I just started tap in. That’s kind of how it came about.
Transcript gets you the verbatim but you better listen to Marshall humming the beat and the piano part while telling the story:
