“Stan” is one of Eminem’s most iconic tracks. It’s a one of a kind song and it’s managed to withstand the test of time over the years thanks to Em’s excellent work with the lyrics. The lyrics and the delivery are absolutely haunting, but according to Eminem they were originally “WAY better.”
Eminem explained that a stoned engineer deleted his original verse for the song. According to him he was almost done with the third verse but he screwed up the last few lines so he asked the engineer to punch him in so he could do it over. Unfortunately that didn’t work out so well and the high engineer deleted his verse and he had to do the whole thing over again. The full story goes as follows:
“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?”
The first half of the verse was GONE. I re-recorded it but you should have heard the original take that sh*t was WAY better…oh well!”