Complex once again come through with the killer cover and interview for their December, January issue. Nothing in print can touch Complex, they consistently deliver the best cover’s featuring the most wanted artist. Check a section of the interview with Eminem below.

You’ve had about five months to sit with your “comeback,” Relapse. What are your feelings about it now?

Eminem: I was happy with it when I put it out—but honestly, I haven’t given it too much thought since then because I’ve been so busy working on Relapse 2.

So the sequel won’t reflect your reaction to the first one and its reception?

Eminem: Well, when I finished Relapse, I had a whole album of material that didn’t make it that I wasn’t ready to throw away, so that was going to be Relapse 2. But then I got with Dre in Hawaii and started recording more, and now the new material has knocked out all the old songs. But yeah, the new material is definitely different. Making Relapse, I was still working the drugs out of my system, so there was a lot of…just jokey shit. It was a lot of punchline-y, funny, shock value—kind of going back to The Slim Shady LP. And that was cool, but I’ve kind of flipped the page. Now I’m going for songs instead of one-liners. I don’t want to make shit that you hear once and then the joke’s over; I want to make records that you could play a hundred times, a thousand times.

Relapse definitely feels like you’re shaking off the dust—it was like I could take the songs out of sequence and put them in order of when they were recorded, because the rhymes got so much sharper the farther you got from the drugs.

Eminem: You’re right, my thinking became sharper again as I went along. If you were to take a song like “My Mom” or “Must Be the Ganja,” those were cool—but they were the beginning stages of me coming out of the [addiction]. It wasn’t until it got into songs like “Stay Wide Awake” that it felt like my mind got sharper. I became more on-point towards the end of recording the album. Right now, I feel like I’m more focused than I’ve ever been. I still feel like I have room to get better but I feel like I’m definitely on my game right now.

Speaking of being on your game, who had the second-best verse on “Forever”?

Eminem: Who had the second-best verse? [Laughs.] I don’t know, I like everybody’s verses—but I like Drake’s verse a lot. I wouldn’t say I had the best verse; everybody approached the beat different. Kanye was crazy, too, and Wayne. I just saw the beat differently than anybody else did; for some reason, I felt like the beat was a double-time beat, so I rapped faster.

For the full interview, go here.

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