Samples and Interpolations
Trivia
- “Stepping Stone” is Eminem’s breakup song with his former group , following his heavily reduced involvement after the death of founding member .
- The beat is reminiscent of Eminem’s earlier work, featuring a sample-driven hook and heavy use of strings.
- The song samples , the brother of Eminem’s most frequent collaborator, .
- In the song, Eminem apologises to his former bandmates, continuing a trend of apologies across his albums: on The Marshall Mathers LP 2, he apologises to his mother in “Headlights,” and on Revival, he apologises to Kim in “Bad Husband” and to in “Arose.”
Words from Eminem, Kuniva, and Bizarre
“Proof was the glue that binded us all together. He did so much shit behind the scenes that I didn’t even realize, and did things to keep us a group and motivate us. […] I think the conversation now, going forward, is to see if there’s anything we can do to help [the rest of D12’s] solo careers. We’ll always be friends, man. We’ve always been friends since we were kids, so we’ll always be good on that aspect. And I want to help them do whatever it is that their next thing is on the agenda — mixtape, album, shopping, whatever it is. […] I write all the time, and that’s my best therapy — to be able to get stuff out. It was like one of those things where I know that they have things they want to say to me, and I have things I want to say to them. So this is kind of how I wanted to tell them, like, “I love you guys forever. It’s just doing a D12 album just doesn’t seem — in this climate, right now? I don’t know how that would even work?”
“It’s just hard to process, because the whole time I’m thinking, “This is not what Proof wanted to happen.” He was adamant about protecting his brand and keeping our inner problems within the camp private. So it was still a shock to me, like, “Damn, I don’t know what the fuck to think about this shit.” But Proof always instilled that—he instilled that in me—and I still believe that. I still believe that’s how it should be handled to this day. There are just so many people running their mouths and talking, telling me or other members what they should do and how they should handle it and whatever, and I’m like, “First of all, it’s not a diss record. Stop doing that shit. He said how he felt, and I’m not going to disagree with how a person feels.”
“It was cool. It’s the truth — we haven’t really been working together for a minute; everybody’s kinda doing their own thing, so I think it was just time for him to come out and say it. We’re still family, though — we’re still working on some shit.