Eminem‘s studio engineer was so high on marijuana, he accidentally recorded over the original take of the third verse of “Stan.”
While doing annotations on Genius lyric website, Eminem revealed the majority of the third verse (“Dear Mr. I’m-Too-Good-to-Call-or-Write-My-Fans”……) of Eminem’s “Stan” was accidentally deleted by his studio engineer, who was high on marijuana at the time. Eminem says the original was “WAY” better. Unfortunately, we’ll never get to hear it.
“When we recorded Stan I worked with a couple different engineers but this particular engineer I had never worked with before. 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.” Everything was cool and 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. Back then we were recording on 2-inch tape, so once you recorded over something it’s gone forever. 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?” Eminem wrote.
The first half of the verse was GONE. I re-recorded it but you should have heard the original take that shit was WAY better…oh well!”
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Read: Eminem wrote “Lose Yourself” during 8 Mile film breaks, he recorded the song in one take
Read: Eminem coined the term “Stan”
