5. Em and Dre submitted the album to Interscope in March 2000, but Jimmy Iovine said it needed more. “The Way I Am” and “The Real Slim Shady” were the result.
“I thought the album was spectacular, but they hadn’t taken it as far as they could… I thought we needed something lighter… to introduce the record to kind of get people into it,” Jimmy Iovine recalled. Dre remembers: “I knew we had a second and a third single, but we needed that big opener.”
Em was furious and responded by making “The Way I Am,” which he considered to be the opposite of a single (ironically, it became the second single). In the 11th hour before the final album was due, Em offered to try one final idea he had: the chorus to “The Real Slim Shady.” In what was a quite unusual workflow for the duo, Dre then made the instrumental to fit Em’s chorus.
Jimmy was pleased. Em said, “After listening to it five or six times it became cheesy. I was like ‘Yo, this probably could be it,” because after listening to “My Name Is” a few times it ended up becoming cheesy to me, too. And I was like ‘Okay this is the formula then.’”
Source: “Ultimate Album: The Marshall Mathers LP” (VH1)
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