Eminem: 'I almost died'

Eminem's latest effort, Relapse, is slated to hit stores May 19, and the rapper told the latest issue of Vibe magazine that it's his first sober project in 7 years. He's been sober for a year now, and the album, he says, is a statement to the world that he's back. He writes in the magazine about his newfound motivation, "I almost feel like a little kid again with rap. I wanna play around with different flows. If I don't feel like it's what I'm fully capable of, if there's one weak line, I wanna change it. Rap was my drug. It used to get me high and then it stopped getting me high. Then I had to resort to other things to make me feel that. Now rap's getting me high again." Before he made the decision to get sober, Eminem struggled with drug addiction that almost took a fatal turn. After getting some mysterious pills from an "acquaintance," he admits that he almost took what could have been a life-ending overdose. "My doctor told me those mysterious new pills were methadone, which is used to wean heroin addicts off dope," he told the magazine's June/July issue. "Had I known it was methadone, I probably wouldn't have taken it. But as bad as I was back then, I can't even say 100 percent for sure. My doctor told me the amount of methadone I'd taken was equivalent to shooting up four bags of heroin. Even when they told me I almost died, it didn't click." Em went on to tell Vibe, "It's no secret I had a drug problem," he says. "If I was to give you a number of Vicodin I would actually take in a day? Anywhere between 10 to 20. Valium, Ambien, the numbers got so high I don't even know what I was taking." And realizing that he was an addict himself helped him to identify with his mother on a new level. "It never once hit me that drug addiction runs in my family," he said. "Now that I understand that I'm an addict, I definitely have compassion for my mother. I get it." Relapse hits stores May 19. http://www.thebeatfm.com/main.html