Nov 19, 2020Legendary producer Jeff Bass has recently done an interview with Samson Shulman where describes meeting Eminem in detail. You can read through and watch the interview below:
“It was a daytime for 93.6 and my brother called up the radio station and asked who was that?! And the host said ‘it’s just some kid named Eminem.’ It was 30-60 seconds freestyle, nothing crazy. But my brother said I gotta talk to this kid! He got in touch with Eminem and Proof, Swifty and all his crew came into the studio. He called me up and says ‘you gotta see this kid, you gotta hear him.'”
“The next day I went to hear what my brother was talking about and he was convinced Eminem and his crew was the next big thing but I was like ‘you need to slow down brother cause I don’t really understand what you saying.’ You know how ‘Rap God’ right? We’ve seen even ‘worse’ than that.”
“Then my brother I went to our manager and said ‘look look, listen to this.’ Our manager didn’t like it but my brother was like ‘naah we gotta do something. And at this point we started working with him.”
“The vision was…First thing I thought, white rapper? Who we all think of? Vanilla Ice? But he was not credible enough. Thank God my brother knew something in his head, I didn’t feel that but my brother did. I didn’t feel until halfway through the ‘Infinite’ album and I started to understand how talented Eminem was. He was creating a cool stories on top of cool track. I liked that! He was saying something! So I would watch him almost like a psychologist would watch facial expression, body language. So I would watch what was he brining to studio today. He was miserable. Well, I’m gonna create the piece of music that keeps him miserable today. I knew he was miserable or angry so if I heard an angry track of music he could actually express himself through that music. They fit it like a glove. It was like they were meant for each other. It seemed like we could do this whenever we wanted to do it. I just had to watch what Eminem was doing. Watch how he was feeling. Watch how his days were going.”
❝ He was miserable. Well, I’m gonna create the piece of music that keeps him miserable today ❝
“Hailie was very very young at that time. She could not even talk. We had her in the studio on 8 Mile in Detroit. We were recording her too. All the sounds effects, crickets, street noise. We threw microphone out on 8 mile road and started recording, we were doing trunk sound and everything naturally. You can get sounds effects easily but we went out there on 8 mile around 3-4 o’clock in the morning and just put the microphone out there. So when he get into studio to rap, he felt that sound effects. It was AMAZING how we did that.”
“Once I played to him something like sounded s**t and he was like ‘that’s perfect! I wanted it to sound like s**t.’ We were open to experiment crazy stuff like that and I never wanted to tune his vocals, ever, when he was singing. No auto-tune when I was involved. Later on yes but not when I was there. When I wrote the song ‘Kim’ it was meant to have someone Merlyn Manson or Ozzy Ozbourne to sing the hook so Em was going to sing the hook and then we were going to show it to Merlyn or whoever we wanted to get on there and then I’m like ‘forget it! you sound great!’ It’s out of tune. It’s perfect. It sounds raw and that was part of what his sound early Eminem was raw. You singing, sounds raw. You are not a singer, you are rapper but he was able to pull that up and no one judged it like ‘oh my god, listen to his voice, it sounds like s**t’, no, they were like ‘wow that’s how I sound when I’m in the shower’ and people started to relate to that.”
